Omnimaga

Calculator Community => Other Calculators => Topic started by: Streetwalrus on December 10, 2014, 03:44:17 pm

Title: Clarification about the CodeWalrus thing
Post by: Streetwalrus on December 10, 2014, 03:44:17 pm
So you guys may have noticed that a few members (including myself) have changed their avatars and signature to a pixel art walrus and the word CodeWalrus. As some have already figured out, these were hints at a new programming group started by Juju, aeTIos, DJ Omnimaga, me and pimath (although he withdrew temporarily and is currently not part of our staff).

I would like to clear things up regarding what CodeWalrus is and what it's not. We are a programming group, that is, a hangout for friends to drive projects together, a label to release our stuff under and a home for said projects to live once they are completed. We do not intend to start a community nor replace Omnimaga or Cemetech as some would fear. A schism in the community is the last thing we want, as we all love the calc programming community as it is currently, and it would make us sad if it was somehow destroyed. The members that were recruited during beta aren't drawn away as they are still as active on Omnimaga and Cemetech.

I also want to clear accusations of stealing code/software to build the site. While it's true that we use a similar forum setup to Omnimaga, all the software we use was not made by the Omnimaga team, except for OmnomIRC whose license allow us to use it freely (besides, Sorunome explicitely allowed us to use it) and the recent posts SMF mod for which we got explicit permission from cooliojazz. Our theme looks similar in layout because it's based on the same default SMF theme as Eeems used for Omni. The smileys are from DJ's backups from when he owned the site, so I don't think there should be a problem with that. If I forgot something here feel free to mention it and I'll give an explanation.

Lastly, we have nothing to do with the Dear Omnimaga petition from a few weeks ago. While we did sign it, the idea to start CodeWalrus dates all the way back from June and we bought the domain in late October.

An effort is undergoing to keep things friendly with the Omnimaga staff, even though it's kind of stalled for now.

Now that the drama material is taken care of, I'm pleased to announce that our group is opening for the public to see on new year, with a few secret projects to discover. These will be cross posted to other sites at the authors' discretion. We already recruited a few members who contributed their creations to the group.

I hope you guys understand that we are not attacking anyone.

Looking forward to January 1st, 2015, and remember the day the walrus started to fly ! ;)
Title: Re: CodeWalrus
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on December 10, 2014, 04:26:51 pm
Actually, to clarify on smileys, there is one emoticon from Omni after my retirement from admin that we use (specifically this one (https://www.omnimaga.org/Smileys/classic/psychedelicO_O.gif)), but considering I provided it myself in the first place as a suggestion back then, I guess it doesn't matter.
Title: Re: CodeWalrus
Post by: Juju on December 10, 2014, 05:29:23 pm
Heh, we wanted to make you wait longer with that elaborate publicity stunt, but the last thing we want is to make people believe we're gonna split from Omnimaga and try to replace it while it's definitely not the case. It's just a new site for a new programming group and we'll want to collaborate with Omnimaga. So yeah, it'll launch to the general public on New Year once we built the website correctly with all the features we want and we thoroughly beta tested it. And you can't really steal what is open source lol.
Title: Re: CodeWalrus
Post by: Streetwalrus on December 10, 2014, 05:42:03 pm
Thank you Juju for that very good tldr version. :)
Title: Re: CodeWalrus
Post by: Keoni29 on December 10, 2014, 06:33:22 pm
So far only walruses have posted in this topic. Can we get opinions from other members too? :3
Title: Re: CodeWalrus
Post by: Eeems on December 10, 2014, 06:38:38 pm
And you can't really steal what is open source lol.
Ehem, licensing. Lack of license means all rights reserved.
Title: Re: CodeWalrus
Post by: Scipi on December 10, 2014, 07:08:30 pm
So far only walruses have posted in this topic. Can we get opinions from other members too? :3

I'm a cat in a walrus suit. Does that count? :3
Title: Re: CodeWalrus
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on December 10, 2014, 07:10:41 pm
So far only walruses have posted in this topic. Can we get opinions from other members too? :3

I'm a cat in a walrus suit. Does that count? :3
At least you're not radioactive <_<

Nice sprite edit, though, lol
Title: Re: CodeWalrus
Post by: Happybobjr on December 10, 2014, 11:18:37 pm
Well said, (Street)Walrus
Title: Re: CodeWalrus
Post by: aeTIos on December 11, 2014, 01:41:11 am
Heh, I like your take on the walrus avatar happybobjr.
And you can't really steal what is open source lol.
Ehem, licensing. Lack of license means all rights reserved.
Also @Eeems I don't think we used any of Omni's (or any site's) code except for cooliojazz's recent posts mod which as street said we got explicit permission for.
Title: Re: CodeWalrus
Post by: ben_g on December 11, 2014, 10:47:57 am
So CodeWalrus isn't meant to become an other calculator comunity, it's mainly just a group of people programming projects together?
Title: Re: CodeWalrus
Post by: aeTIos on December 11, 2014, 10:48:50 am
Basically, yes :)
Title: Re: CodeWalrus
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on December 11, 2014, 10:55:51 am
So CodeWalrus isn't meant to become an other calculator comunity, it's mainly just a group of people programming projects together?
Well, technically it would be a third calculator site, because there are two calculator sub-forums and currently all featured project sub-forums are calc projects. It's just that the initial userbase that was let in is almost completely within the same friend circle and the site policies and views are different than Omni and Cemetech (much like Omni has different policies and views than Cemetech).

It's also closer to a programming team than a community news site. It's pretty much dormant from 8 PM to 12 AM, though, because only 3 of the active members who have Internet access at home live in North America. This is why I often performed site-breaking maintenance and testing around those times <.< >.>.


EDIT: Also Streetwalrus, a little correction: The domain name was actually bought on November 3rd, not in October. Back in October, the site name was still undecided (although only 1 name idea didn't involve walruses).
Title: Re: Clarification about the CodeWalrus thing
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on December 20, 2014, 05:28:50 am
Now that December 19th has passed, here is a little update about the site current status, for people who did not have the chance to learn about the plan or people who just signed up and might have been wondering why their forum account is not being approved yet:

-Basically, to sum things up, it is possible to create new forum accounts since December 10th, now that the social login plugin is setup correctly, but since closed-beta is done and that the site opens on January 1st, your account was not approved yet. Don't worry, you were not forgotten nor rejected. An e-mail will be sent upon account approval, assuming you aren't using a fake e-mail address, and activation will not be required.

-The IRC channel (#CodeWalrus), which is merely an hangout for the site users, is already reachable since early December and it was recently made -s on Omninet (so that it shows up in /list), although the Freenode and EFnet channels are still +s.

-The current staff members (who founded the site) are assigned to various sub-membergroups, but every staff member in the member list shows up as "CodeWalrus Staff" by default. Their sub-groups are listed in their profile or in topic view:
 * Moderators: aeTIos, Juju, Pimathbrainiac and Streetwalrus
 * Forum maintenance: DJ Omnimaga, Juju, Pimathbrainiac and Streetwalrus
 * Server maintenance: Juju, Pimathbrainiac and Streetwalrus (I am currently in this group until January 1st)

Server maintenance is self-explanatory, forum maintenance involves managing categories, the theme, modifications and in-board SMF upgrades. Forum maintenance staff also has some limited moderator powers (whatever doesn't involve deletion/banning) and moderators has every moderator privilege. All staff participates in huge administrative or moderator decisions (they only have 24 hours to do so, though, unless stated otherwise), but depending of their positions, they might not necessarily be able to apply the decision.

-The entire site is funded by me (and my music sales) and the URL is obviously the one in my signature (or if you can't see signatures, http://codewalr.us/ )
Title: Re: Clarification about the CodeWalrus thing
Post by: Juju on December 31, 2014, 04:57:13 am
Bump to remind you that the site opens on January 1st at 12:00am UTC (7pm GMT-5, 1am GMT+1 for you other timezone folks). At this time, all the accounts will be approved and registrations will be open to everyone.

I also remind you that it's not intended as a replacement to Omnimaga or anything else (more like a complement, and we're willing to work with the admins on this), neither we're quitting Omni or hate anything (that's silly), we didn't stole anything either (it just happens we use mostly the same software as Omnimaga) and this is not related to previous petitions at all. The admins there are very friendly (well, you guys know you can't go wrong with me xD), but common sense obviously applies.

Visit us at http://codewalr.us/ and have fun!
Title: Re: Clarification about the CodeWalrus thing
Post by: Princetonlion.tibd on December 31, 2014, 12:22:28 pm
I've been checking the countdown on the main page every 3 hours :P
Title: Re: Clarification about the CodeWalrus thing
Post by: alberthrocks on December 31, 2014, 01:10:41 pm
Hmm, this looks interesting!

So here's my perspective on this. I think this is a great idea, and personally I know a few people who I'd band with to make a coding "guild" of sorts.

However, there's only one thing I'm sort of puzzled about - why SMF/forums? Typically, I (and other "groups/guilds") would be making a blog of sorts to announce any progress or ideas from the group itself. Personally, that's something that I would be aiming for, but other "groups/guilds" that do this include places like Popehat (https://www.popehat.com/) (a group of lawyer folk), CodingHorror (http://blog.codinghorror.com/) (a programming blog), Linux Mint's Dev blog (http://segfault.linuxmint.com/) (a development blog for the Linux Mint OS), and even professionally, the NYTimes Open Code Blog (http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/) (a professional blog about web/backend dev for NYTimes). IMO, a forum isn't necessarily the best platform for a group of sorts.

If a group desires to interact with the community, often they will seek to find a home in a larger community. A well known example is NSIS (http://nsis.sourceforge.net/Main_Page) (installation framework for Windows), which houses their community in the Winamp forums (http://forums.winamp.com/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=65), since a good portion of their modding/plugin community live there.

Now, as a counterpoint to what I said before, there are communities that are built around software. Gaming is a big example - big AAA companies like Bethesda Softworks have their own forums (http://forums.bethsoft.com/forum/117-v-skyrim/) dedicated to Skyrim, EA has their own forum (http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/categories/list.page), and anybody who has used Steam knows that each game has its own discussion groups, too. Forums definitely work great for soliciting feedback, especially for major companies.

For me (and the potential group), a blog will simply suffice. Indie game devs, hardware hackers, and even Ndless (http://ndlessly.wordpress.com/) like using a blog for displaying progress, as well as soliciting feedback and support. If we really need a forum of sorts, I may go with something like Discourse (http://www.discourse.org/) (or even Vanilla Forums (http://vanillaforums.org/)), light discussion board software that I've often seen used in many kinds of communities.

For you guys, maybe a forum will work. The only thing is that with CodingWalrus, I would expect that the forum will only have discussion on the software being developed by CodingWalrus - offtopic/general discussion is unlikely to occur there due to the nature of the site. If that's what you guys want, that's great - and hey, it might become something big!

Regardless, it's all up to you guys - I've voiced my opinion here. Either way, you guys will have my full support. Less than 6 hours left at the time of writing - good luck with the launch! :)
Title: Re: Clarification about the CodeWalrus thing
Post by: Juju on December 31, 2014, 02:25:16 pm
Thank you Albert. Of course we could easily had installed a Wordpress and called it done, but we deemed a forum was more appropriate with our goals and the features we wanted. SMF is simply the forum software we knew best and we knew it worked (instead of going through the trouble to learn another one all over). The main page will effectively serve as a blog announcing our releases, though (we'll leave the rest to Omnimaga news :)).
Title: Re: Clarification about the CodeWalrus thing
Post by: aeTIos on January 01, 2015, 02:53:53 am
Aaand we're open!