While Cemetech is clearly rooted in education technology, recently it has branched out into more general areas, as noted in the SIGGRAPH 2016 post. Although this change has occured, I do not believe the forums have changed enough to reflect this shift. Despite there being a "General Programming" and "Website Markup and Scripting" subforum, it is still quite difficult to find specific languages if they are not education-related. For example, if I was looking for iOS Objective C/Swift help, I could not find that easily, as it does not have its own subforum. Instead it is simply mashed into a "General" forum with many different programming languages.

My idea is to have a seperate forum category as follows:
-Education Technology and Programming
--z80 & ez80 Assembly
--TI-BASIC
--Casio Prizm/FX Development & Programming
--HP Calculator News, Projects, and Support

-General Programming
--C, C++, & C#
--Java
--HTML, CSS, PHP, XML, CGI, and Javascript/JQuery
--Objective C & Swift
--Python
--Graphics
--1337 Programming Tips

Kerm has noted that if Cemetech converts to general programming, it may drown in the sea of websites already devoted to that. To be honest, I'm not worried for a multitude of reasons. First and foremost, I know Cemetech will always retain its education technology roots. Knowing that, it's unlikely Cemetech would lose any members, only gain some from more general categories.

I've been more or less looking at how we can reorganize the forum. I started with the gaming sections and am slowly mulling over the rest of the forum. I appreciate the feedback you have here.

The one thing that's largely preventing me from touching the coding section is the HUGE amount of posts already. I like to be thorough. When I created the categories for Cemetech Minecraft Server 1.8 and 1.9 (now 1.10) I went through the ENTIRE Minecraft category and separated the topics out to their respective parent. That way, folks looking for 1.8 threads continue to post in the 1.8 area. (Though, I'm pretty sure I've locked those topics).

I want to do that with the general programming section but I lack the commitment to cycle through the 518 topics present in that category. Some are easier to move than others as they have the language mentioned in the topic title. But how do I address the C language topics for the TI-84+CE from those that are for the computer? Likely scenario would be to put a programing sub-forum under the TI-84+CE category. Then there's so many different languages. If I could get volunteers who only had permission to only move topics, that'd help immensely.

I can't make a sub-forum for everything. So, do I do the big contenders? JavaScript, C++, anything else? I'm wary on Swift since so few of us actually own Apple products and consequently even less have a desire to program on them. Don't get me wrong, I'm a believer of "Build it and they will come" and that if we have a Swift sub-forum it will see topics and activity but I also want to respect Cemetechs current model, where we create categories and sub-forums for popular and in-demand subjects. So, it's a balancing act between two differences.



I actually like what you have proposed. Rather than one sub-forum for each language they are grouped by likeness/similarity. I feel like some of those may be popular enough to break off into their own sub-forum but I'm really the last person who should have that authority since I'm not exactly knowledgeable with programming languages.



I second. We already have our base. I feel like once our members out grow their calculator programming hobby and take up "real" programming projects, they desert us. I would love it if Cemetech dropped the Calculator facade but it's who we are. We cover a lot of TI news. We review calculators (TI and others). We don't really branch out and review other electronics. So, again, with that balance. Our core demographic is obviously the graphing calculator user. And with other sites, they have categories devoted to special interests; an example being an apple rumor website I frequent has categories for Digital Photography and Mac Programming, it's not just about rumor topics on those forums.

It's going to be a slow and gradual change, if it happens.

I would volunteer, as I would love to see Cemetech branch out more generally


We can do the big contenders, as you said, and then have an other languages forum. At least the languages that are most in-demand would be easy to find, and the rest could be found using the search bar.


I wasn't going necessarily by popularity, but by similar topic or syntax. My reasoning is that similar languages yield similar questions with answers that could potentially be used interchangeably- especially if the languages have almost the same sytax.


Unfortunately, that happened to me recently, but as the school year starts again people are going to want more calculator games to play (hopefully not during class, but it's unstoppable ) so here I am again


That's unfortunate, but I still think with the support of the community we can fast-track it!

Thanks for the great and insightful post, Alex!

For SourceCoder, while using it, I have noticed that the left block (The one with a tree of tokens) is quite big and prominent, for how rarely it is used. It would be nice to have a small arrow for hiding/opening it, as it robs precious room of the main block (With the actual program).

This is of course merely my opinion, though an option for hiding it would be great.

I feel like this would be an appropriate post for the SourceCoder Suggestions topic :)

I HIGLY suggest the possiblity to highlight all the admins (and eventually another option for all the moderators). I had many, many cases where something happened at SAX or so, and I needed an admin, for banning or something else, but I don't want to remember and highlight all the admins, so such option would be greatly appreciated

I think it would be nice if editing a post changed your total word count/average words per post. Sometimes I notice that I make some unusually short post and add more information to it, but the numbers on my profile don't change.

In the past, our solution has been to occasionally run the stats from scratch, to account for edited posts, deleted posts and topics, and so on. It's a good suggestion, and something I've wanted to implement myself, but it's so far from being a core feature of the site that I've never pushed myself enough to complete that change.

It's a great idea, and we'll try to figure something out for that. In the meantime, you can send an email to admin at this domain, or contact us via direct messages to our Facebook page.

I think you may have missed his idea. He wants a command on SAX - or via IRC bot - to ping all the admins in case immediate assistance is needed, or at least ASAP.

I think this may be a good idea for a poll system. If 2 or more people use it then it pings admins and maybe sends a message to the Staff channel. To prevent abuse, maybe limit it to once every 30 minutes?

Yep! If I'm awake, then I receive admin@cemetech.net emails immediately, and we're both quite responsive to Facebook messages.

I think it would be much more convenient to have the "Posts since last visit" button in the "Logged in" box - more useful than to have the "New posts" link there, I think, because when you log in, it makes more sense to check the posts you have not yet seen, rather than all posts made this week or so.

I disagree, because on PhpBB2 and SMF, Posts since last visit is completely broken. If you open that section and your browser crashes, you close the tab by accident or you suddenly have to go, then on your next session the posts since your last visit will no longer appear in the list.

I wish they had done it so that they remain there forever, until you click the topics to read them. But sadly, they didn't and this is why two other calc forums use custom recent posts list.

As a result, I prefer the weekly posts list and rely on the pink unread icons to detect unread topics.

In a way, we do have a "Posts since last visit." When you click on "Recent Posts" the topic icons are a pretty opaque. As you view a topic and go back, the icons become a bit transparent, signifying that they've been read. If you sign out then back in, or log in from a new browser, the topic icons will all be the transparent version.

It's not an elegant solution, or really a solution at all, but it could help!

You could make the unread icons more visible maybe, like how on SMF it shows "new" icons.

This has probably been asked before, But could we see BBCode codebox integration with source code? So we could attempt to import basic tokens right into source coder (and consequently jstified?)

I was going to say that we already had that, but a second read enlightened me. You want a special type of [code] tag, say, a [basic] tag, that will have a "Copy to SourceCoder"-ish link? I think that's a great idea!

Something like that, more of a button on the [code] tag to arbitrarily copy the contents to the source coder editor pane. I think that would be better for those people who do not understand what the basic tag would be (Read: Not know it exists), and as well as old posts that could contain basic code.

Ah, yes, that's basically the same idea as the CEmu one, regarding loading from an external source, more specifically an [open in CEmu] link on forums' codeboxes. I started coding some stuff about all that, but never finished. The custom protocol comm (cemu://...) was working nicely though.
One day, I'll get back to working on that...

That would be really nice for links to like apps and stuff. One day I guess huh.

For jsTIfied, can you add ti nspire cx support?