A most people know, the $12 Arduboy System thread ran a bit wild, eventually resulting in the creation of the Homemade category.
The topic was then locked, just over 50 posts before it would have been auto-locked anyway.
However, that means there’s a lot of discussion in that thread that can’t currently be continued.
So the question is, would it be worthwhile for one or more moderators to spend some time trying to extract the old conversations that were either interesting or specifically about Arduboy clones and put them into their own topics so the discussion can potentially continue?
I like to be democratic, so I’ve prepared a poll.
Yes, but it should be done over time to lessen the impact
Yes, all in one go so the disruption is over with as quick as possible
Yes, but people should flag the parts of the topic that they found interesting as a means of manually requesting the extraction
Yes, but only for posts about clones, ignore any chit-chat
You’re all still welcome to express your views with comments.
Having a poll simply helps to get the opinions of people who don’t want to comment, don’t have anything to add or are too busy to comment.
As the jam is currently ongoing, any action would most likely be delayed until after the jam results to prevent coinciding with the rush of activity that happens towards the end of the jam.
It’s a tough one as some of the chit chat and what may appear too be babble could contain some info that could be read out of context.
That being said the useful reference stuff is the pinouts that mostly @MLXXXp posted it would be handy if these were put into their own individual posts mini pinouts, pro micro pinouts and so on or just a big locked topic of pinouts.
Personally I would leave the topic intact and create new posts with the info in a handy to find format.
In an ideal world we would have a wiki like wiibrew where everything could be indexed.
In case you don’t know, moderators can choose to pull whichever posts they want, the posts don’t have to be consecutive.
There’s also an option to pick ‘this post and all replies’ which makes context easier to keep together.
I think acomplishments like these shouldn’t be sitting around rotting in a locked topic, they should be on display in their own topics (in #arduboy:homemade).
And of course there’s obvious stuff like this, where the entire thread ends up discussing a single topic for several posts and probably should have been a different thread to begin with.
I’ve made a start on the migration.
I’ll aim to do it slowly if possible, perhaps try to move no more than one topic a day or wait until there’s a lull in activity before moving.
The first migration I’ve done is @Mr.Blinky’s Arduboy Mini (i.e. Pokemon Mini clone) because there was a recent question from @random_king about it earlier in the week (which I’ve now tacked on to the end of the thread) and because it spawned a large number of replies.
The resulting thread can be found here:
@Mr.Blinky, if you don’t like my choice of topic name, you’re welcome to change it.
Thanks for splitting it up @Pharap When my 128x128 16 gray OLED comes I’ll know where to post it also I reminder I need to finish some experiments soon
I’ve spent some time today chipping away at the thread.
It’s currently down to 289 posts.
I didn’t count how many splits have been made, but I’d guess somewhere between 10-20.
All the splits have been either showcasing an Arduboy/Devkit clone or asking for help.
There were two little mishaps where too many replies were grabbed, but those replies got moved back.
(Hopefully the adverse affects of that will be minimal.)
Most importantly, all of the splits make semantic sense and could be easily continued if desired.
One very large cup of coffee later and it looks like pretty much all of the useful information has been split out into easily searchable topics (which naturally may take some rediscovering).
* You had so many that I lumped a bunch of them together, so let me know if you want them split up into separate threads.
A number of discussions also found their way onto the Help & Information category because they were asking for help with building a clone.
After deleting all the split points the thread is down to 64 posts,
the majority of which are either actually about @MLXXXp’s clone, or are part of conversation that directly references said clone.
The question is now whether to:
Try to recover parts of it so that @MLXXXp can have the thread about his clone back.
Freeze it in time as a monument to history
Delete ‘unnecessary’ chatter
Attempt to fix the out of order posts
A number of the remaining posts are people saying ‘this is my favourite thread’ which is kind of ironic now.
I’m fine with whatever you decide. IMHO you could leave it as it is now, and leave it open in case anyone wants to comment or ask questions specific to my design. As usual, any new posts that aren’t directly related could be moved to a new topic or a more appropriate existing one.
At the moment it’s still closed.
(Though there are out-of-order comments after that point due to a slight mishap.)
If you have no preference then I think I’ll wait for @bateske to offer an opinion,
and failing that I’ll re-examine it and decide which route is ‘cleanest’.
When my 128x128 16 gray OLED comes I’ll know where to post it 
also I reminder I need to finish some experiments soon 