Haxe Forum Problem - Obvious way to sign up

[BP]

Hi there;

I've been doing a bit of haxe work for about 2 months now, and wanted to sign up to the forum at haxe.org, but couldn't see how to do it, which I think is probably a problem:

I did the following:

- Went to haxe.org

- Clicked on "Forum"

- Clicked on "New Topic" at the bottom of the page

- Was redirected back to the haxe.org home page.

I looked closely at the forum page for a place to register as a new user, and couldn't see a link. If I'm missing it somehow, then I think it'd be great if a link could be added to the forum page for "Register for the  forum" or something like that, as I'm probably not the only one that's missing it.

As a slight side note, I got involved with haxe because of haxeflixel, and it just recently had a website setup for it at haxeflixel.com.

The site, and it's associated forum, have really made a huge impression on the importance of a good forum for the advancement and development of a platform, and I humbly suggest that improving at least the visibility of sign up links for the haxe.org forum would be a good thing for haxe's ultimate future!

Thanks so much for your great work,

Brad

[j...@justinfront.net]

Brad

I have updated the forum FAQ with information about "Login" see the first post in this stick post.

http://haxe.org/forum/thread/1323

The haxe wiki login was very obvious until the haxe site design was improved, it probably reduces random spam, as it is less obvious that the site is a wiki, but also makes the forum less obvious to use, and is something we have probably overlooked.

I agree that a forum is very important most advanced users only use the haxelang mailing list so it's kind of tricky because despite the simple nature of the forum, it is the lack of good developers answering questions that is the main reason it is not used more.  Currently only Me and Jan try to cover most questions, and where possible we normally try to get some useful links or an answer for a new user, there are a few others answering questions but not many, and atleast new users get a quick response sometimes we have time to post some code, but our backgrounds are mostly flash target focused so while we both try to keep some knowledge of other areas, haxe is a very wide subject covering a wealth of technology.  Occasionally I do request a core developer to take a look at a thread but often I end up suggesting users use haxelang mailing list or IRC and forward NME questions to the haxenme forum.  I think the main issue is that many regular haxe users prefer a better forum software and so don't use it, but ironically its rarely the complexity of a forum that makes a forum, they can be tricky things to build user involvement, and more often it is the advanced users sharing knowledge with each other that make the real difference.  So even with more advanced forum it may still be as dead.  And as I have pointed out Nicolas released the code so any user could improve the forum drastically with some work.  But I think as first point of call it is often useful.  Wiring an IRC client as a main haxe section means that lots of users start with the IRC instead which I think is better really.

The haxe IRC is often quite active and certainly there is more advanced users involved it would be great if some how the two could be linked, but maybe we should move the forum to a sub page so that new users start with the IRC.  The one disadvantage is that IRC tends to be a bit dead between 4am and 8am uk time ( approximately ) whereas people expect a forum post may not be answered straight away but atleast can ask a question when others are in bed.

The NME forum ( haxenme.org ) seems to be a bit more active than the haxe.org one, but again there are not so many knowledgable users answering questions, mostly Joshua and a couple of others, so it sometimes suffers similar problems, and despite appearances more threads are probably answered on the haxe forum but probably less well.  It would be probably better to mix haxe and nme forums and any other haxe library forums into a single place.  I still have haxe3.org and haxe3.com domain if someone wants to use it for this, happy to help moderate (kill spam), but maybe take more back seat on actually answering all the technical questions, ideally we need up to 10 specialists to cover all aspects of haxe so that we can be sure of the quality of the answers, I can probably come up with a list of some haxers I would like !

But while haxe forum takes a lot of flak I think the fact that me or Jan get to most questions often within hours is good, but yep we are limited, and when we leave advanced of obscure questions unanswered we are very grateful to the users who do pitch in but we do need more for it to really start to succeed and for it to be a place i would actually ask a haxe question myself, and unless it becomes such a place it's unlikely to be more than it's current position as a first point of contact.

Haxe is always changing so never easy to always give correct information, especially about haxelib's ( I have not tried haxefixel for instance ) which we may not all use so large user base of technical experts would help.

|f your interested in improving the haxe forum code you can find a link in the FAQ above I am sure Nicolas would be happy to have pull requests to consider, and if you want to test something online happy for you to use my webspace and haxe3.org folder if it helps while testing.  I guess it's easy to ask for improvements but it's up to users to do.

Sorry too many thoughts, but probably better to ask your questions here than on the forum.

Best 

Justin

Haxe Forum

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[Brad Parks]

Hi Justin;

Thanks for the quick response. And lots of information is better than not enough, so your thoughts and efforts are greatly  appreciated!

I've registered for an account... thanks for the help!

Brad