Separate core and compatibility forums? Maybe legacy/modern OpenGL forums?

I’d be interested whether anybody would like to see core profile related topics separated from compatibility profile related topics, or told in another way: legacy OpenGL topics separated from modern OpenGL topics. Personally, I would.

I see the following benefits from separating them to two different sub-forums:

  1. People who are more familiar with legacy OpenGL could more easily find topics where they can help, and the same for those more familiar with modern OpenGL.
  2. It would be easier for everybody on deciding what solutions to suggest for questions, e.g. one hopefully won’t suggest the use of display lists to solve a particular problem one asked about in the modern OpenGL forums.
  3. I think it would be a more clean separation of topics than the existing beginner/advanced separation which tends to show no practical benefit in most cases.

I’m open for praise and blame :slight_smile:

+1, if the separation is really enforced by our mods.

I’d like to see seperate subforums, but i don’t think it would work.
We see peaple now asking OpenGL ES questions here. Questions with legacy code from persons who are just learning OpenGL and beleave that code is state-of-the-art. Beginners who don’t know about profiles.
If the beginners would be aware of this whole core, shader based vs legacy, compatibility, fixed-function-pipeline stuff, more of them would state what they are using in there questions to begin with so we don’t always have to ask what they program.
I don’t think seperated forums would work unless someone would constantly move topics around…

[QUOTE=menzel;1238229]I’d like to see seperate subforums, but i don’t think it would work.
We see peaple now asking OpenGL ES questions here. Questions with legacy code from persons who are just learning OpenGL and beleave that code is state-of-the-art. Beginners who don’t know about profiles.
If the beginners would be aware of this whole core, shader based vs legacy, compatibility, fixed-function-pipeline stuff, more of them would state what they are using in there questions to begin with so we don’t always have to ask what they program.
I don’t think seperated forums would work unless someone would constantly move topics around…[/QUOTE]
I agree with you that for newcomers it might be non-trivial whether they should write to one or the other forum. However, maybe I’m just too optimistic, but having in the description of the “core forum” something like “if you are unsure whether your question belongs here then it definitely doesn’t” might help.

Obviously, I’m not that idealistic either, thus I believe that the outcome of this discussion probably would be that this is an idea that cannot be solved in practice. But who knows, maybe somebody figures out a better approach than mine :slight_smile:

I personally don’t like separate subforums in general, because it confuses less experienced people, and experienced people don’t need them.

Already separations like GLSL, advanced, beginners, on Windows, etc are quite blurry.

You’re right. Maybe tags in the forum title will help (as you can use multiple if you are unsure:
e.g. [core] Vertex Attribute problem
[compatibility][MacOS] Why can’t I use geometry shaders on 10.6?

But that as well has the problem that not everyone might use it consistently.

I think it is a good idea to have more subforums. It is easier to survey and find right topic if the forum has a three-like structure.

[QUOTE=aqnuep;1238223]I’d be interested whether anybody would like to see … legacy OpenGL topics separated from modern OpenGL topics.

2. It would be easier for everybody on deciding what solutions to suggest for questions, e.g. one hopefully won’t suggest the use of display lists to solve a particular problem one asked about in the modern OpenGL forums.[/QUOTE]
I can see both sides of this, but on the whole, I’d vote no. A few of my thoughts: First, I’m on the more practical side of the camp that wants to get GPU work done the fastest, and I don’t much care what theoretical stamp someone has put on a piece of functionality. If it’s the fastest and it’s not ugly or complex, then it wins. The suggested separation, as you allude, would sometimes function merely as a muzzle to talk honestly about the real-world performance or behavior of features and extensions, deferring to a theoretical standard of “political correctness”. Just like a “no democrats here” or “no republicans here” policy on a discussion board – hardly productive, especially for a technically-focused group like us. Beyond that, IMO this forum doesn’t really have enough traffic to justify spawning off other subboards.

I agree with Dark Photon. However I would suggest a sub forum for questions related to extensions that are not in any version yet (ARB, EXT, AMD, NV, SGI, …etc.)

Only if the topics are always at the correct place. Which is far from true.
And we already see quite a few topics that are cross-posted on several sub forums, this will only make matters worse.

Tags could be a better solution but I am not even sure it is needed.

Cross-posting can be a problem, but the moderators are allowed to remove duplicated posts. Furthermore, they/you can replace posts from one subforum to another if they are not appropriate for a certain subforum. On the other hand, if posters don’t know where to put their post how they could know how to tag them. It is still more undetermined. I still don’t think having multiple sections/subforums is a bad idea.

How is it a good idea? You need to provide reasoning and/or evidence that this is needed. And thus far, there has been little of that presented.

Dark Photon’s most important point is this: this forum doesn’t get enough traffic to justify it. We get maybe 30 new threads a day. Do we really need 10 different slots to put those 30 threads into?

It’s not like the beginner’s forum is so overrun with questions that a person who only visits the forum daily is buried under an avalanche of new posts to read.

As it stands, we already have people misusing the categories. People will post purely GLSL issues in the Advance forum. People will post what are clearly driver bugs in the Beginner’s forum. Windows issues will wind up in the Math section. Or whatever.

How will adding even more categories improve things? What is so deficient currently that needs to be corrected with more sub-forums?

This sounds more like a programmer’s obsessive need with categorizing and imposing order than anything of actual use to the site.

Every idea has its pros and contras. For example, I remember there was a thread about some CUDA problems considering speed of execution and a very good advice how to change precision model in order to get better performance. What is the chance to find that posts now? Everything will be much simpler if we have an interoperability section (subforum) for all CUDA/OpenCL/D3D posts.

I couldn’t agree with you more. I met the same problem so many times…

Every idea has its pros and contras.

No they don’t. Some ideas are fundamentally better than others; by contrast, some ideas are unquestionably worse.

For example, I remember there was a thread about some CUDA problems considering speed of execution and a very good advice how to change precision model in order to get better performance. What is the chance to find that posts now?

I don’t know; is this it? If it is, I found it in 5 minutes by searching for “CUDA performance precision”. I never read this thread and I didn’t know what I was looking for. So if I found it after a quick search, I’d say there’s a good chance there’s no actual problem to be solved.

Everything will be much simpler if we have an interoperability section (subforum) for all CUDA/OpenCL/D3D posts.

How would that make “everything” “simpler”? It would only be easier to find under the following two conditions:

1: There were very few threads in this interoperability section, and thus you wouldn’t have to use the search function. Searching for “CUDA” on an interop forum is basically like searching for every thread in that forum.

2: That the thread you were looking for were actually posted there. Sure, you say that moderators can move threads around. But that’s basically admitting to the fundamental problem: if you need a mod to clean up after basic user behavior, then that’s a problem with the system, not with the user.

I agree with Dark Photon, and Alfhonse, not worth the bother of making a separate forum category of Core vs Compatibility. I think Alfhonse hit the nail on the head:

besides, the categories are far from disjoint. Tags is better: GL4+, GL3+, GL2+, GLES2, etc. The GLES2 forums at khronos are pretty sorry state (not the forum itself, but the content), so well, we all get the idea.

However, a separate forum for “interop” would be nice where CUDA, OpenCL, related interop issues (and only suc) would go would be good, because right now there is no good place to put such questions/suggestions, etc.

Thank you, Alfonse, for finding the lost thread. :slight_smile:

Well, Daniel, we obviously have to build better searching skills.