Home Forums FineTunedMac Community Lounge Let's Remember Why We're Here

I know many of you are chafing at the bit to post here at FTM—even though it's been barely a week since you became aware that MFIF would be going read-only—but I'd like to make a heartfelt request: that you keep in the center of your field of view the fact that we are first and foremost a community of folks bound by our common passion for Macs, and that our future success is tied to our ability to develop this site into the kind of Macintosh resource the MacFixIt Forums have always been.

To this end, I'd like to suggest that rather than taking a passive approach—partying here in the Lounge while waiting for a trickle of troubleshooting posts to somehow evolve into a steady supply—we actively build the site we want to see.

For some, especially those who were new to the MacFixIt Forums at the time of their closing, this will be easy: they have unresolved issues or unanswered questions, and can pick up here at FTM where they left off at MFIF. For others, like me, it may mean posting questions about minor issues we've never gotten around to dealing with.

We'll be putting together an FAQ forum with posts on all manner of oft-encountered issues (VoiceOver, anyone?), so that when such an issue arises, the poster can be referred to the relevant FAQ post; in tandem with this FAQ forum will be a discussion forum in which the individual FAQs can be hashed out. The entire FAQ initiative will take a lot of work, so there's room for everyone to be involved.

And even here in the Lounge, in addition to the inevitable goofiness there's an opportunity for delving into more serious issues of the Digital Age. It may have been an unusual degree of online social cohesion which led so many folks to embrace this site so quickly, but let's not forget how we got to that point in the first place: by discovering, in MFIF, a community of Mac users committed to making one another's Mac experiences better.

Let's make this the site we'd want to see if we were, today, looking for the kind of site we found at MFIF when we each first discovered it. Friendly, welcoming, knowledgeable...and serious about our purpose.

How will the FAQ forum be different from the old Tips forum? Not to say that this is a bad idea (it's actually quite good) but I'm not certain of the reason for a change of name. FAQ usually refers to questions about usage of the site, board rules, etc., not necessarily tips. I'm concerned that posted tips might produce so many FAQs that they will be hard to find (unless you're doing a search, of course).

The FAQ forum—tentatively titled Mac FAQ—will be a collection of Mac-related frequently asked questions. In other words, a collection of answers to issues which we frequently encounter in the troubleshooting forums. (Hence my reference to VoiceOver.)

I expect you'll understand the concept once those two forums go live; my explanation in the above post was probably too cursory, because I was in a hurry to make the point that in the absence of a steady supply of requests for troubleshooting help from outside the founding membership, there will still be plenty to do to build the site.

Thanks for your efforts in making this all happen.

Some of us could contribute more here if the topics weren't limited to problems and solutions. While we're creating our new home, could we expand its focus a bit, and make room for threads that provide tips along the lines of "this worked for me"?

As an example, I'd be happy to write a short article about getting good audio out of a Mac and using it as the basis for a high-quality home audio system. Would a thread like this belong in the Audio, Video, Photography section, in the FAQ section, or in a new area?

That's a good question, and one I don't have an immediate answer for. The staff will undoubtedly be having numerous discussions of issues like these in the near future, but I think I can safely say that if you've got an interest in sharing a particular area of Mac expertise, there will be a place here for you to do so.

I'm sorry. From now on I'll try to only ask you questions that you know the answers to.

> I'm sorry. From now on I'll try to only ask you questions that you know the answers to.

Considering the infancy of this project, questions that make the Mods think are going to be the order of the day for a while and, in the best interests of the entire FTM community, should *not* go unasked.

Dave, from your last reply to dk it appears to me you found his response off-putting somehow but for the life of me I can't figure out what he said that prompted your reaction. Care to shed some light?

It was just my dry humor. I was laughing when I wrote it.

These misunderstandings have happened before on other sites when I forgot to insert a smiley.

And now I'm laughing, because I wondered if something like that might be the case and I'd feel foolish for asking. Ah well...not the first time that's happened to me.

You can always add one...

Of course, first you have to realize you "should have" used one in the first place.

Almost cute, not really presented with much humor, although that seems to be the intent. And he had the advantage of being able to use facial expressions, voice inflection, etc. where we don't when writing. Oh wait! That's what the smilies are for....

Priceless!