Hi Everybody,

The salient phrase from Jan's post is (emphasis added):


There have been several recent threads discussing the possible demise of this forum as the 805x processors age, and as the members who make this forum the place it is grow weary of explaining the same things over and over again. I've even noticed recently that there are times when the whole forum goes "grey" (on the post listing pages) to lack of interest.

It seems to me the value of this forum is, as Jan so succinctly stated, the independence of the site and the experience of its members. That seems a lot to lose for no better reason than the natural life cycle of a single product.

The simplest way to vitalize the forum and ensure its future would be to open the forum to a broader range of topics. This will allow the forum to evolve with the industry and with the experience of its members.

The threat then becomes that if the forum is too generalized the valued information will be lost to the dilution of information overload. So let Wikipedia be all things to all people. The valued experience of the members of 8052.com is specialized to embedded systems in particular. General electronic, and other, experience/interest is coincidental to the value of the membership.

On the other hand, if the forum becomes a collection of sub-fora it will lose value to factioning and fracturing the membership into niche cliches.

So instead of restricting the forum to 805x, I would suggest opening it to discuss all embedded systems regardless of µ-processor/controller, without subdivision. This will preserve the synergy of the diversity of experience among the members. But I would also keep the general electronics and non-embedded discussions on the chat forum to preserve the utility of the main forum.

Anyway, that's my thought on the matter.

Joe