> Heck, even I would still use it to ask "newbie" questions safely without being flamed.

Not having a Newbie Safe Area forces all posters of all threads in all forums to be nice to newbies. Flames are bad no matter where and who is the target.

Actually I don't see this problem with flames to newbies here, and not even the other myth of answering newbies with command line instructions. Rude language is sometimes exchanged between members with hundreds of posts on their backs, and use of CLI (using acronym as pun intended) is shown mostly in threads that are clearly for advanced users, or to trigger a symptom or solution where no GUI will help anymore.

> Remember that newbies are more likely to ask first, read later.

Those would go to General (as a percentage already do) and from there we would redirect to the right place (as we are doing already).

> It's like expecting a baby to be an adult by...

You can turn this omelette by saying that there is plenty of places in the Internet that welcome huge amounts of newbies every day without the need of having a Newbie corner. They just have a good architecture able to make happy newcomers and regular users.

Real architecture had this problem too. First there were not buildings welcoming people using wheelchairs. Then they patched special accesses for weelchairs on those buildings. Now buildings of organizations caring about weelchair users are designed with common accesses making happy everybody.

> Babies instead need their crib to grow in first.

Maemo runs on devices targeted to heavy Internet users. This is the norm we can expect here.

> In it it said something to the effect that to think of the newbie forum as a "gateway"
> and that threads posted there will more than likely be moved later.

It was edited as a result of another discussion. Now it says

Which is more or less the same.

> When do you expect most of this reorganization to be complete...

It could be done pretty fast if there would be a benevolent dictator pushing the changes without discussing much. But this is not the situation we have, so we are discussing here the changes giving the chance to anybody to have a say.

The more we discuss the more it will take to complete the changes. This is a known handicap of participative systems.

> what about compromising by moving it to a stickied thread in General?

Not very useful compromise in my opinion. Offering the General forum as default basket for hesitant posters and moderating those posts moving them where corresponds is much better for everybody.

> There are other discussions regarding the newbie forum in which you participated,
> but you don't acknowledge those in your post.

Mmm ok, I still don't see what is your issue exactly. But yes, because I care about newbies and because the new maemo.org with ITt inside needs to be a nice place for newbies I have been trying to help going ahead with changes. For what I recall:

- Tablet Scene should be put out of it's Missery was started by 'ITt guys' and after dozens of posts it ended up with no conclusion. Yet the problem was/is still there, and growing. So I'm trying to push a resolution asking to Krisse/Reggie whether they want to hold it back and maintain it or we can drop it.

- I also asked Krisse whether she had any interest moving the discontinued Tablet School to school.maemo.org, by the way.

Where else? In Forum reorg pointing to talk.maemo.org I wasn't the first one suggesting the deprecation of the Newbie forum (nor was any 'maemo guy') and actually I thought it was good to keep it initially. After almost a month moving threads from Newbie to elsewhere I'm certain most of those threads are no different from any others started in other forums, and actually many of them are not started by newbies at all.

> It's reminiscent of the poll where the no change option was forgotten

I don't have anything to do with that. Actually I haven't voted because I don't find the current status so bad. But this is not relevant at all: if someone is willing to push that discussion with the aim of making this a better forum, fair enough and thank you for your time.

> It's become apparent that there is recent attention to changing the forum right
> before it moves to maemo.org.

Reggie would go ahead alone with more disruptive changes in the past, as founder and administrator of ITt. Now he is busy and his responsibilities were taken by nobody. In the meantime the talk.maemo.org plan was proposed and accepted. ITt would be today talk.maemo.org already if it wouldn't be because the maemo.org redesign is taking longer than expected.

Yes, I have been active in all these processes. In a quite transparent way. My goal is probably your goal as well: to have a place where the Maemo community can discuss, help each other and have fun. Being a good entry point for newcomers is an essential factor of success.

If the plans go ahead, Fremantle and Harmattan will increase exponentially the amount of newcomers coming to this forum. This is a key reason why I'm interested in paying a better attention to newbies, as part of my job (like now, in office hours) and also as a proud volunteer in this community (like most of my posts here, sent from home and late night).

> "pre-purchase/pre-device" forum

Normally a potential buyer goes after a specific device, and we have one forum for each device. This is why I think it's better to have those posts in the devices forums. Also, a pre-purchase question & its answers is very likely good information for many owners of such device. The same happens if the question is about software.

> I read the original sticky and like a good soldier did as I was instructed.
> Unfortunately a change was made while I was doing my thing. Now there
> is no mention of the original instructions and I feel like I'm in an episode
> of the Twilight Zone.

You will survive, will you? With the previous policy your thread was moved and with the new policy you thread has been moved as well to the same location. A big deal?

Again, slow progress with hiccups is a known side effect of partipatory systems. Sorry for the road works and please move on.

I will wait for more feedback before asking Reggie to do anything with the newbie forum...