Bit-tech has lost its spirit

I think its a problem that is affecting a lot of places that all you ever hear are things like 'what should i get?', 'is this any good?' as much as you want people to come into the site, everyone gets fed up of posts like this.

I do like the idea of this though. http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=109581&page=1&pp=20 it's a just for fun thing that builds up a community. Understandably it's difficult to cater to everyone on a site but usually these type of fun comps only improve relations. It is also a kind of back to roots thing where you try and bleed the overclocking life out of an old card .

 

i agree with mww... ever since the project logs have been split into project logs and project discussion i dont look at the projects anymore, also i dont post there... old system felt much better to me, there was a constant discussion and people actually posted their ideas that referred to what was on pictures.

 

The problem is that all of the mods that are cheap to do have been done. It takes massive amounts of money and hunderds of man hours on tools that people dont have in there garage to create an origional mod now a days.

And even them are not realy mods, there from scratch builds.

The constant stream of people who cannot use google or the search button and expect to be spoon fed a step by step guide was the thing that stopped me even bothering looking at the modding forum.

I think modding is becoming to main stream along with geekyness to some exent and its taken a bit of fun out of it for me.

I rember back in the day when having a cold cathode was a mod. now you have to try very hard to make something that you cant just buy in the shops.

I dont like to say it but i will anyway. I think comp modding is dieing out and has been for a while

 

I'll agree that the modding is lacking some what nowadays, but that's due to the originality. Most of the mods here have been done time and time again so it don't raise any eyebrows (except G69T CNC godness ).

I still like bit-tech as a modding/review site as it is now, I agree that their should be more mods from the forum on the main site under the modding section as the recent stuff have been... well reviews, boring to me.

 

I wonder if part of the problem is that Bit-Tech is a victim of its own success. We have 22000 members now; a substantial number. There is an influx of n00bs who ask the same obvious questions over and over (and over) without bothering to use the Forum Search, Google or even refer to the rules, thus creating a subtantial ammount of irritation with other members. Keeping them in line is frustrating. I find that, to put it in Bindi's words, the more I moderate here, the more I turn into a whingy old git (Sam0r recently mentioned that I'm always so bad-tempered and frankly, he has a point). We do not really want to rule by enforcement; we'd like the community to handle itself. But that doesn't always happen...

Then, as Bindibadgi says, the bar of modding raises continuously. What is a truly outstanding mod today, is run-of-the-mill tomorrow. I remember that Metaversa was pretty revolutionary in its day, and although it incorporates about 12 original ideas, by the standards of some of the work that is displayed on the forums nowadays, it is a good piece of work, but nothing outstanding (anymore). It is increasingly hard for people to build something remarkable with limited means (and then G69T comes along with his professional CNC machines and blows it for the rest of us.. ).

On the other hand, with more and more pre-mods and modding components available, it is also increasingly easy to build a moderately decent mod. When I built Metaversa, I more or less had to build my watercooling loop from scratch; there were no 12V pumps widely available (I had to look long and hard to find a car turbo watercooling assist pump), no flow sensors (hence I sourced a Swissflow SF800 which I worked out for myself how to connect to a motherboard); I had to drill out an Aquatube for wide bore, and had my CPU blocks made bespoke. I lovingly polished my Maze4GPU to a chrome finish myself (Coolmiester takes the credit for the idea however). I made my own BIX shroud, and designed my own GPU support bracket to help it cope with the weight of the GPU block. I sourced my own tubing separators, etc. and designed my own pump/rad mounting bracket. Nowadays, however, you can just buy a lot of cool looking Aqua-Computer or innovatek gear out-of-the-box and slap it into a nice aluminium Lian-Li V1000 and you're done --no personal creativity or resourcefulness required. You can even buy the Maze4GPU in chrome... This, too, raises the bar and makes it harder to build a truly outstanding mod.

We need to get back to that grass-roots creativity; that mod-it-because-you-can experience, whether outrageous, ghetto or purist engineering. We need to find a balance between being supportive of n00bs, and n00bs taking this forum more seriously (and reading the g*dd*mn RULES). We need the community to take responsibility for moderating itself (posting feedback at the end of transactions in the FS forums yet, guys?) and perhaps, asking what it can do for the forums, rather than asking what the forums can do for it.

 

I think a good thing would be to have a couple of competitions which aren't corporately sponsored, and which have prizes which go to the people who have skill, not just randomly selected. The community needs to be more involved as part of the main site, as right now it seems that they are two separate things.

 

Totally agree ozstriker, the "old" bit-tech felt a lot more community driven. I guess part of it is when for the staff it stops becoming a hobbie and starts becoming a job you have to keep more control of content.

It would be nice if things that grew out of the forums would get a mention on the front page, just as a link to the BiT EU Counterstrike server or the IRC channel.

 

Surely they can't be seen to be associated with the yobs on #bit-tech
Maybe if the CS server was advertised on the front page, then it might actually get some people on it

 

I liked it best when folk like NoObY-DoObY, jamesweb, hydrogen18 etc. were around

 

I remember reading some of the mods a couple of years ago, and finding inspiration. Now I just see stuff thats pretty boring

Like, someone painted a case.. wow!

And then on to the forums, the only thing I dislike about the forums is the ammount of "noobs" that are registering lately. We seriously need some sort of IQ test.

Maybe there would be a way to moderate a users first post (I don't mean edit, I mean that thing where you get emailed the post and you can chose to either ban or allow the post/er)? Or stopping people creating new threads untill they have a certain ammount of posts?

Oh, and users need to speak at least decent english, else they get banned, its a message board, not a freaking pub, thats irc

 

That would be kinda nice.
However, some people have a question they can not answer themselves, and NEED help from people.
Likewise with the accept/deny new thread, Mods will have to dedicate a lot more time to "moderating" if it were that way with a community this large.

A nice idea though.

 

You can hardly blame Bit for that - the reason why mods were more impressive a few years ago was because nobody was doing them. Now every man and his dog can dremel a quick window in or whack a few CCs in their case, it's still the same kind of stuff, except it's far more mainstream now.

 

I didnt come to bit-tech just to look at finished mods. I came to see the process. Mods dont need to be jawdroppingly incredible in their finished state; I'd far rather go from the beginning, go through and see all the modifications that were made to the original starting case to get to what it is. Quite honestly, thats what I really enjoyed the most - the process of spicing up a boring old case, or a generic one, into something special. In one sense, the case building companies are responsible a bit for the degredation of the community; its all but impossible to find a solid, barebone case that isnt already pre-modded to all hell with plastic facias.

 

Tell me what's wrong with the project logs forum then?

 

I'm still relatively new to the site (even though I've visited the site several times a day for some months now). The Orac3 article/guide is what initially drew me here. I bookmarked the site and haven't looked back.

I keep returning on a daily basis because Bit-tech.net offers many features that cannot be found elsewhere. I pay more attention to the forum than the articles frankly because any "news" will be covered everywhere else. However, I have enjoyed certain reviews or commentary articles every now and then.

BUT even though the site has apparently changed, there is still a lot of creativity floating around. While I wasn't around for the "good ol days" I've been here long enough to know that I'm pretty impressed with the quality of my experiences here.

It may be that I've been checking the forum more often, or it may be a new development, but I've noticed that there have been a lot of technical questions floating around. It might be beneficial to add a few forum categories such as a "build your own PC" category.

 

The "community" feel of bit does seem to have wandered off. It now seems to be a small bunch of people answering the same questions over and over again. This is mostly due to people not bothering to search old threads.
Said the same in many threads before (broken record anyone??) the WHOLE community is getting over-run with n00bs. Basically due to modding/computing/overclocking becoming much much more mainstream.
4 years ago it was a hardcore few who overclocked/used water or more exotic cooling... Now water is mainstream, as is overclocking. Phase Change cooling is heading the same way.
However IMO the level of knoweldge held by new users ISN'T growing. While they can splash out on a shiny system, cool it to the hilt they dont really know whats going on when it all goes tits up.
Its so much easier to ask someone on a forum/PM/MSN than it is to trawl the net for an answer.

Think the attitude of people has changed too, people used to me MUCH more willing to help/give advice.. Finding quite a lot here (and elsewhere) if you post a thread it'll get ignored/spammed or go off topic. If you dont know an answer or dont have anything constructive to say dont.

 

http://forums.procooling.com/vbb/showpost.php?p=116545&postcount=34

Food for thought...

 

Indeed it is. And I'm inclined to agree to be frank.

The community feel has gone a lot more from the place now, I realise it's because we have a lot more, new, members, but it can still be salvaged imho.

One thing that could be improved, and don't take this the wrong way, is the news reporting that goes on. Under the old system, a couple of mods would spend a large chunk of time finding news and reporting it in the News forum for our delight and delictation. Now, although there are still people reporting the news, it doesn't come anywhere near quickly or frequently enough, and it's restricted to what kind of content comes up, as it's on the front page.

What we need, imho, is a news forum like the old one, where a few people can post about news that isn't tech related and on the front page.

That, and we need people to update the front-page more often with more news from the tech world.

For example, as I type this, Macs with Intel processors can now have XP installed on them.
This has been out for a few days now, and there's not even a snifter on the frontpage about this fairly big step in computing - not least because someone managed to do what Apple engineers decided was far too difficult.

 

While I do agree with a lot of what you say, Da Dego, it still would be nice to see some mods on the front page. I for one don't want mods every week, but some of the awesome ones deserve to get some extra publicity.
I think my main source of unhappiness (and it's not really unhappiness, I still love Bit, and go on it every day) is that the modding section seems to have been sidelined a little. Since you expanded the rest of the site, why could that section not be expanded?

Edit: I realise how ungrateful I sound.

 

A couple opf random thoughts related to this...

First, I agree, seperating the mods and the comments on them seemed like a good idea, but I don't think it has turned out very well. I used to to visit the modding forum a lot more, but now it's too hard to correlate the process with the questions being asked about it.

2. This has never been the friendliest forum to be a part of. You talk about wanting to see innovative new mods, but when you ask "How did they do that?", the response is usually somthing along the lines of "Look it up yourself, noob!". Even in the Serious Discussion forum where I can usually be found, you'll often see in a response "I already answered that in post # whatever, why didn't you read it?!" but when i go back and look at the refered post, it is indeed not answered.

3. There is a lot of news, both tech and otherwise that gets posted in SD because the "Recommend for news forum" seems a bit cumbersome. Perhaps what we need is an "Official news" posted by the moderators and an "Unofficial news" that any member can post to.

I came to BT fairly recently (a year ago or so) and so it was never just a modding site to me. I've always thought of it as a general computers / electronics site and treated it as such. I think that to really recognize the bredth of the membership here you have to realize that there are a lot of people here who are not here for the modding, but for the many other forums.