Sad to hear this. I never actually participated there myself but the new move does seem quite lame indeed.

Also, note to the editor: I think this article has the wrong topic

Yes well, somebody from TI told me that this was going to happen, but advised me to ask my question anyway.

Is there some type of question/answer thing on this site?

No but i agree... this website needs a forum :P

Also Nspire is epic DRM fail (don't buy unless someone cracks it.. and even then, don't buy because TI will patch the exploit). I just assume stick with my black hardware version: 1 ti89 (and Mathematica for when i don't want to find my ti89 :P).

There are forums, kinda

http://www.ticalc.org/ programming/ideas/
http://www.ticalc.org/ programming/upcoming/

(remove space between "/" and "p")

but I think people prefer to discuss regulary on bulletin board systems rather than old style messageboards. Ticalc could update these pages with more sections and make it more like Invision Power/PHPBB/SMF and then make them more visible to the rest of the community. However, I fear it may take years to pick up because there are alerady like 15 other TI calculator forums out there (United-TI, Omnimaga and Cemetech being the most active, then Revsoft, MaxCoderz, TI-Freakware, CalcGames, Outside The Box Programming, Detacheds Solutions, Unsyntax Software and a bunch of others that are hardly active anymore.).

Yeah, if we could somehow work out a modern dynamic content system that our now-ancient server hardware could handle without falling over, we could do a lot of neat stuff, including forums (this has been discussed for a long time; it's the non-dynamic issue that's holding us back). Even with the file archive, the possibilities would be endless...

We also have several mailing lists which have been around since forever, but these days they only get about two posts a year. ;-) Info is at http://www.ticalc.org/community/lists/ if anyone wants to give them a try. We've still never gotten around to putting the ML archives back up, though. :-(

Why not have a bunch of official ticalc.org google groups for the various classes of TI calculators ?

I also think it would be good to maybe close some "ancient" threads that nobody views. Maybe put them in an archive file that somebody can download if they want, but can't post, because they are "closed".

That might save some space. I still don't see what could be so difficult about a server hosting a forum. It would be cool to see, but they would have to figure out some sort of architecture that would allow the server to handle all of the users, and not have something like two top-level posts, and have 100 be lower level ones, which would make it harder to get to the other sections easily.

Maybe we could have a "numbered posts" architecture where each post is simply added, and we could have a little thing that allows us to show a link to a certain post, like be able to type in this: "<link num"5">" (Note that that is not a html link, but rather some sort of thing that allows that post number to be seen when the mouse is hovered over it, or able to be seen when clicked on.

Just some ideas, although I am starting to get off topic.

wow... the mail lists... that bring back some memories of when I was checking if someone was planning to port Mario Kart to z80 calcs and checking old help topics

You know what would be awesome? Discussion forums that are the same across several sites. That way you could be on the same (federated) forums as everyone else, but access it via your preferred way.

If there's a Usenet backend to some webforum, that would be ideal.

<selfpromo>
Cemetech hosts the tiSAX chat widget that's linked across quite a few sites, Cemetech, Outside the Box Programming, UnSyntax, etc, but each site retains its own posts, so that's not exactly what you're talking about, and it's as far from non-dynamic as you can get.
</selfpromo?

Yeah, Digital Restrictions Management + no documentation + no SDK make the Nspire (Nspire CAS) a complete loser.
It's a major shame, but it looks like TI still hasn't understood that "hackability" and third-party development (despite the annoying protections that don't prevent users from doing anything, only just make the programs more complicated) was _THE_ factor of success in the marketplace for TI-Z80 and TI-68k calculators. It's their loss, after all...

<< "hackability" and third-party development (despite the annoying protections that don't prevent users from doing anything, only just make the programs more complicated) was _THE_ factor of success >>
*cough* Phoenix *wheez*

This is not entirely true. You are forgetting that while the average user may be great to sell to, the Government / school systems are much more profitable to sell to. The schools probably did not want a calculator that allowed people to easily play games and since schools buy far more calculators than any other source, TI intelligently listened.

TI gets a lot of its sales from schools requiring its calculators for use in classes and if they lose that, that is a ton of lost business.

Ya but games would never stop a school from buying what is basically the only choice :P

I mean teachers literally don't want to have to learn a new platform (which i bet is hurting the NSpire adoption on large scale which in turn is reason TI is trying to just focus / force Nspire into the limelight)... lol TI is hurting here in terms of selling this crap... lmao it all fits.

So in short TI decided the end user doesn't matter... and tried to accomplish every single item on the teachers-wishlist in order to sucker them in... because once they get the teachers, then the teachers can force the students to buy it.

CalcG.org has a nice forum. That's the one that I use.

And the fact that you own/run/maintain that site has no bearing on anything, right?

To be fair, I kinda saw this coming, because the last few times I visited TI website I could never find these groups. They were made so incredibly hard to access that I had to use Google to find them and even TI search engine wouldn't find any relevant results. This still sucks, though, because at least you could get help directly on their site. I do hope they continue providing help and ressources for students like other TI forums, preferably those that are more oriented toward help and support and all calc models.

Click on support at the top.
Scroll down and click on discussion groups.

It was cooler when there was a front page link.

I kinda know what you mean there. Personally, I always liked the work Ray Kremer did there on the forums and it was a good all-around spot for technical support. But I always felt the ti forum was way too tucked away on that place. You look at the myriad of twists and turns to get there and you're like: "What are they trying to hide?"

ticalc has always been one of the biggest in calculators with programs. This really sucks.

1) Everyone already knew these groups were dead
2) Why are there news items infront of the z80 GameBoy emulator? Why is that not featured?

Mainly because Michael Vincent is being held hostage, and we've been too busy trying to negotiate with the kidnappers. [citation needed]

Well, I emailed him with a feature request, then reconsidered since it's still sort of unstable.