What sort of forum should the Roon community site provide?

Roon Community Site
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Post above startled me - it looks mean and simplistic, but on thinking it better there is a good question/discussion item here.

As a new Roon user, you learn about this forum. You go in and it looks like a community. As a fairly technical person, the need for support is not that big on the purely, purely, “I have an issue, I need technical support” sense. Sure, I have some questions; there are things that bother me about Roon and I ask for workarounds or sometimes my OCD makes me ask the silliest of questions about the smallest sometimes obvious things - do apologize for that - but in general I am most interested about the community.

So, superficially, you see the the myriad of topics and go in thinking “community”, like Audiophile Style, ASR and many others… and yes, you assume you are free to state your opinion, defend and even campaign for what you think is right (specially in this subject) etc. But looking into the discussions you see there is a battle for what the forum should be

1.- Should it be just a support forum? - There seems to be some advocacy for that. Take the example of the JRiver Forum - it seems to be just a support forum. Every entry is a question or a issue from a user. Or info from JRiver. That’s it - not sure if there is an unspoken agreement arrived at early on OR if is the work of policy/moderators/admins. BUT, well, I was never there. Like I said, I know my s**t - so almost no need, unless something went wrong with JRiver itself.
So I never felt like I belonged to a JRiver community.

2.- Advocacy - Simply, a community that promotes Roon. Not incompatible with No. 1 so they could coexist. Nothing but, in the word of many an influencer, positivity :smiley: and helping each other. Ideal, in some sense, but well, as you noticed, we do have opinions. Me, personally I would also stay away.

3.- A true community - with freedom to discuss anything and very light touch on the moderators. Again, not incompatible with the support goal.

At first, it looks like 3, but is obvious to me that there is deep down fight for what it should be. Specially in the light of the polarization of the audiophile community. I do get the feel that there is majority that not only feels No. 2 ( advocacy plus support) is what it should be. It also seems to be that that majority also seems to be in the subjective camp. And well, advocates of No. 3 ( free community plus support) seem to be in the objective side. Hence the fireworks. Generalizing for discussion purposes.

The guidelines make me think that admins/Roon want the forum to look like a free community, but wish it would stay closer to an advocacy site. Hence, some of the language, which could be and is misinterpreted. On both sides.

My suggestion is to define clearly what you want and retool for that - the reward should be a happier bunch. Sure I might leave, or least don’t comeback unless I have an issue, which again, is almost never, since I know my stuff.

I am sure no v around would a be plus for many! :smiley:

v

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You are not required to read them, you know…

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I don’t quite understand this analysis. An advocacy site? Really? Why? The only people here are people who are interested enough in Roon to sign up for a membership on the forum. Who would they be advocating to? Almost everyone here has already paid for Roon. Sure, there’s some cheerleading going on, but people love to rationalize their sunk costs. I can’t see this as advocacy, annoying though it may be.

It also feels like there are some missing possibilities. It could be a music discussion site, which some use it for. It could be a hardware discussion site, which others use it for.

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Right - you are not wrong there, indeed a perceptive person - I basically thought that “cheerleading forum” would be somewhat insulting, so tried to avoid it, but is pretty much what I wanted to say. But since you brought it up! :smiley:

All possible - but hardware discussion kind falls into the support side, while music is kind of neutral - is a feature of many communities, cheerleading or not. I am mostly talking about what does Roon wants this forum to be in general. Suggestions above are specific.

v

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My feeling is that you’re building a bit of a strawman here - come for the file format knife fights, then give the newbie with a technical problem a hand (and then punch said newbie in the mouth if he ends up being on the wrong side of the very important file format issue) typathing.

Now if you look at this from RoonLabs’ perspective, you probably don’t get as many people who’re willing to spend their days doing free tech support, but you’re likely to get a few of those who’ll simultaneously be happy to help others while taking a break in between bouts of arguing ad nauseam on trivial matters.

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Not my intention - and guess if, as you describe this is what it happens, then well, is reality! And to be fair, that is exactly what I find fun! (see my posts!) :smiley: hehe

I think you removed your strike-out text! :smiley: - because I was gonna say “HEY! I resemble that remark!” :smiley:

But truly - between this situation with the MQA thread and things I have found out separately, will definitely step back from the Roon forum - will start treating it just as customer support resource.

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Yes! Thats exactly what I was going to say too! I thought @Xekomi 's original post was well worded.

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I don’t know, but I suspect it’s the balance RoonLabs is trying to hit. MQA is obviously a touchy subject, because it’s polarising, there’s the history, and there’s the “everything that’s been said has been said” aspect.

@kevin was kind enough to do it for me :stuck_out_tongue:

what can I say - takes one to know one :stuck_out_tongue:

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For the most part I do not read most of the posts that show up in the “new” and “unread” but I do have to click on and open each of the posts to clear them out. Otherwise I will have to sort thru hundreds of accumulating posts to find those that are meaningful to me.

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I expect you know this, but just in case…

You can mute specified categories via your discourse preferences (click your avatar). You’ll never see posts in those categories.

Unread topics will only appear if you are Watching or Tracking. See the box bottom left of a thread - you can click on this to change this back to normal (or even mute)

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Excellent suggestion; I wasn’t aware of the mute option - just did that for a lot of categories that are not relevant to me.

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Fortunately I was aware of this as I was getting tons of new post notifications.
I found that once you had read a thread from start to finish it activated you at tracking level.
I then found all I needed to do was adjust to normal at bottom left for ones I found I had zero real further interest in.
Saved a lot of unwanted read notifications.

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You can set the default behaviour in your preferences too. It’s worth spending 5 minutes tweaking prefs. Makes for a much better forum experience.

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