Yeah I definitely think if you guys want to expand Cemetech's range of specialties go ahead but make sure to maintain our calculator roots.

Actually, we had switched to talking about Cemetech. I'll address your thoughts with respect to Cemetech.

I'm not sure exactly what you're saying here, can you clarify further?

Very true. As far as the Cemetech archives go, so far I've copied the ticalc.org model of author/ coauthor/ coauthor/ coauthor, but as I work more on the archives I'm thinking it should be author / coauthors, where the author could be a group ID and the coauthors the members of that group. Ideally, groups would be forum user groups and linked as such. We've never really experimented with using the phpBB group concept except for Global Mods.

Well, what features for Cemetech (or ticalc.org!) would be interactive, fun, and fit into the current foci?

Definitely, I like that plan. Admins, start rejecting submissions that lack screenshots.

Cemetech is about 60% of the way towards having that functionality.

Absolutely. Duly noted as rejection criteria for Cemetech. ticalc.org should listen too.

Interesting, but that sounds like it would take some significant backend work to implement.

I think that its vitally important to keep calculators at the fore-front of this site. I have moved on some what from calculators but yet still maintain an interest (and a large scale project). I think that if this site starts to move too much from its calculator roots, we are catalysts for this depression of calculator programming that we all seem to be seeing. I mean the picture at the top of the website is a calculator for crying out loud. People can go almost anywhere for things like PHP, that's not gonna die out anytime soon. Calculator programming is so rare, and its so hard to create a new calculator forum, almost none of them catch on. The thing about ticalc was that it was a hub, a place that all people UTI, cemetech, maxcoderz, revsoft, and omnimaga alike could congregate and share a wealth of knowledge. If we let cemetech move from that, we let an entire branch of calculator programming die, which is a significant portion.

Sorry for the ramblingly long paragraph...

well, and B31337. the coolest of course would be if authors could request a group to be formed.

Sure. When an author submits a file they should have the option to include CSS to coincide with the file. This CSS can 'promote' the project. Like if I were to add CSS to the page of my Money Maker, I'd probably have dollar bills & coins floating in the background. Or a user can have a generic CSS for all of her/his files - though the CSS should be monitored for relativity - and contain some professional appeal; no repetitive or distracting backgrounds - to the program, if submitted for each file.

Why not the user ID? And everyone who 'officially' contributes to the project/program is placed inside the projects usergroup?

Project blogs with hype ratings or similar (Digg reference). Cemetech is 'dynamic' by the fact users talk on the forums and through SAX, while TI-Calc is mostly browse, download and ratings/reviews aren't really encouraged.

Perhaps, or it could be as easy as assigning the submission a value of zero when it's first submitted and upon each rejection it gets incremented by one. Maybe that is the backend work? Not sure :O

When I first started programming, ticalc was essentially the jump from calculator-gaming sites to calculator programming. Those simple, repetitive programs inspired me to program calcs in the first place.... without them I would do little more than play Phoenix with my calculator....

The calc community is dying because we are no longer supportive of the n00bs; there are few active sites where someone with no programming experience at all can learn. If cemetech garners a larger file archive (especially games, to draw in googlers), or ticalc gets a better forum, a "new generation" of calc-programmers will be inspired to code.

BTW, frankly I think ticalcs archives are fine; its the archiving thats the problem...

Mmm, of all the stuff you mentioned in your post, that's the one I'm most skeptical about. I see way too many opportunities for abuse of that feature.

Exactly. OK, I think I'll do this today or tomorrow. It won't require that much overhauling, since the current system is fairly straightforward and not accessed in a ton of places (although I do need to remember to update the stats scripts and update scripts accordingly).

I still feel like Cemetech could be even more interactive, like list reviews made and ratings given on user pages along with the submitted file list. Actually, I think the whole user system could stand to be more individualized/interactive.

But the trouble there is how you'd let users edit their stuff in the pending queue. Hmm, even that wouldn't be terrible. Keep reminding me about this, I don't hate it.

True, but are they going to have the motivation? I know that most of us started programming after playing calculator games we got from friends and wanted to see if we could make more and better games ourselves. Do the kids these days even have that motivation, or are they just going to whip out their cell phones and play more powerful/complex/graphical games?

I have no problem with the archives themselves, but since they're hardly ever updated, stats are daily (Cemetech has hourly archive stats updates that complete in <2 seconds, so I'm not concerned about scalability), and we have no good way to suggest/add features to the archives, I'm in favor of the local archives.

It would be simple, when the program is rejected, it gets added to an 'edit' que (or similar) where the user will make the needed edits and those edits will be saved - along with the note and ID of the previous submission reviewer - and added back to the 'submission' que with a value of +1. The whole process may be redundant, but there are affective redundant systems

Hmm, I'm thinking of Three Que's:

Submission
Edit
Submitted

A user can see which if their projects are in which que, any projects in the 'Submission' Que, can't be editted and thus don't appear as links. The projects in edit, will appear as links but will take the user back to the file submission field that already has their program info displayed, as well as any comments the reviewer had. Finally, there's the 'Submitted' que, where these are just links to the project page - where there will be a link to edit the project, or perhaps that should be on the list of projects page?

I'm also thinking of a link another user can press if the program needs to be fixed. The program will be automatically resubmitted to the submission que after a reviewer assess the problem first hand with details from a report given by the user whom encountered the error. (with more lenient rules regarding number of trys to fix the problem)

Seems a bit unrealistic I suppose now that I read over everything

ticalc pwnz ur fase

There's no reason that all of your different queues can't all be the exact same queue with different flags and such set.

[Or] Variables?

Well, flags are normally implemented as a field within the database, which would work out to be a variable. Simple enough.

It's not quite dead yet they had a minor release yeah!!!

Oh! Who wants to bet how long till the next update?

I take close to Dec. 25th... I'll put my 'money' on Dec. 23rd.

What's pathetic is those 11 files probably represent less than 5% of their current backlog. I submitted a file probably over a month ago and the backlog was ~170...

It's very sad that ticalc.org is dying, as it is the most used archive site for the TIs. I think it's due to the fact that most of the programs there are low-quality...

Well, the quality of submissions is extremely inconsistent, at any rate. They tried to do something about that with the rating system, but not enough people used it to make it that they could do useful things with the rating metrics.

I think what could be a better solution would be to have one file for everything. Like have one quadratic equation solver consensused to be the best. And then don't accept any more. If someone submits a new quadratic solver that has a feature that the "good" one doesn't, then change the "good" one to include said feature, attribute it to the programmer, and still only have one. Or maybe just take all of the features from one type of program, integrate it into one super-program, attribute (and get consent from) the original coders, and just have that one. But there are a ton of programs that are redundant and whatnot.

Plus, I think there should be different tiers of forums. And not like "this forum generally has good coders, this one generally has noobs". There would be one BBS, and on it there would be different divisions of forums for different skill levels. Of course, there would be no rigid boundaries and you'd be free to post in whatever forum you wanted. But there would be different places to post. Because inexperienced users do need to learn and share their ideas, and experienced users need to have their own place. But if you mix them together, you have the little kids poking around the legs of the big kids mussing everything up and not learning anything.

That's a good way and all, but the realism isn't there. I mean, if there are twenty quadratic solvers submitted each day, someone would have to download each one, test them out and determine if any surpass the current 'leader.' I just don't think it's practical.

It'd be more practical to have each category have it's own page, but only the top five or ten have places; there would be a link to see the rest of the files. And every month the files that haven't had any downloads, get deleted - which would have to be in the terms of service agreement users sign when they create account.

This is great idea, but the appeal of the forum would have to be massive to get users to leave current communities. Even the attempt to just get the communities to cooperate in this effort would be difficult.

And of course there's the fact of determining who's a 'n00b' and who's an expert. There use to be/is a group called the 'Basic Elite,' which I tried to get into two to three years ago, but was rejected; Kerm is a member (if I'm not mistaken).

The only thing I can think of to solve ome18kanal0n3's problem would be to expedite the process.

This is probably illegal, but we (read: Kerm) could modify SourceCoder or a regular emulator to run programs directly from the Internet and parse the code so that it can be interacted with as on a regular calculator, but be copiable and in regular ASCII format (just an idea). For most programs, really, only a cursory examination of the source code would be required before either a) integrating the new features into the existing program or b) deleting it.

I mean, if there are 20 quadratic equation solvers submitted every day, you're going to run out of innovative features pretty soon. There's a finite amount of unique quadratic solvers you can write before they start running together. I mean, you can rearrange subroutines and use different syntax but it's going to be the same thing regardless of who writes it.

And it would probably help if a less eager approach was taken. Instead of "yay everyone write 18 crappy ten-line programs and then dump your RAM directly to the archive", you'd be encouraged to check for duplicates before writing/submitting/etc. I've written my own quadratic solvers and such, not knowing it's been done thousands of times. And that's fine, there's just no need to submit them.