Well, I'm not going to get into a pissing match about this. It's already devolved into something way outside the norm for CT and frankly I am ashamed and embarrassed to be a part of it. But I am a big believer in honesty and facts and some things I have a hard time letting go. And I will go on record saying I am surprised at the seemingly agenda driven childish behavior (like taking your ball and going home) from someone I held in high regard and had a lot of respect for. There probably is nobody else on any of these forums that has put more of their own effort into trying to help others and improve the state of things. That's a large part of why I am so surprised at this thread and the actions taken.
First of all, this whole thing isn't about who said what first. Great ideas and answers come from many places. There are some very intelligent and helpful people on many forums including AVS, RC, CT, CQC, etc. What this is about, at least to me, is a very popular and important topic to alot of people. In that regard my point is that it is silly to duplicate the same info in different formats all over the various forums. It would be ideal to have 1 place that people from all over can come to get the best, most up to date info on prewiring a home. Hell, maybe it should be an entire independent website like an opensource project.
All I know is that CocoonTech is an extremely popular and highly regarded place where a gentleman by the name of John Lehnert (in addition to Dan/electron himself) put in an enormous amount of time (just like you do for CQC and such) and published a "Guide to wiring your house" in an attempt to take information from all over in addition to a TON of his own personal knowledge and tried to put it into a single source to help people. And help it did. It has literally thousands of hits and accolades from people all over the net. But it had one major flaw, which was admitted to early in this thread - it got a bit stale. More new devices came out, more good ideas were spawned and yet the guide remained stagnant. While it offers a wealth of info as is, like anything else, it can be improved, and that was the whole supposed point of this - take something that already has a ton of info and keep building on it and improving it. Don't reinvent the wheel, don't spread it out into pieces all over the place, that's all going backwards.
I know you are a very intelligent guy and understand all this, which again is why it seems you have some hidden agenda to all this. But that's all I have to say on this subject. The readers here are also very intelligent and can figure it out on their own and use the tools they think are good. And as much as I don't want to do this next part, I just have to correct what simply is not true.
Sorry, but most of that info was generated from other sites. This site may have a lot of security info, but that's 12 of the 39 items. Furthermore, 3 of the 12 items came from other sites. The other info may be on CT somewhere, but only because experts from other forums came here and posted it.
here's a link to AVS from back in June 2007, where I created a predecessor of this list. Here's a link from March 2006 from CQC. The earliest thread you show is from Oct '07 and has a small subset of this, which should be proof enough that a lot of content was external.
Snopes would label this a myth and back it with facts. Sure, there may be some items on that list that were not posted here but it is just pure BS to say only stuff about security is found here. There is plenty on HA, etc dating all the way back to 2004. But again, who cares? What's the difference where info came from? Nobody is saying stuff on CT is from the sole minds of CT staff and membership. And my intent in listing a bunch of those threads was not to show who was first or right or wrong or whatever, it was simply to say that this information is scattered all the hell over the place and hard to find and is precisely why a guide or an updated wiki or a sub-website or whatever is a great thing to have to point people to. In fact the original wiring guide was first published
March 1, 2006 which predates any of your lists. In fact, in May 2006 you yourself came to CT asking questions about wiring and yourself was pointed to the document! Maybe you took alot of that info you learned here and put it on other sites? But again, WHO CARES, the knowledge is not proprietary, the important thing is that people who need it can find it. Maybe we should give credit to Bob Catanzarite who built a structured wiring website apparently in 2001 and was mentioned on CT in
Nov 05. But again WHO CARES!!! I just think its a good idea to have a place where some very bright and dedicated people keep a comprehensive document updated.
And it should be important to have it in one place. Why are there tools like dropbox and all kinds of file synchronization tools in the IT world - so that you don't go places and find inaccurate data. You now have this info on CQC where it was suggested to put it in a how to section. So now, there will be a document here, in whatever form and a how to thread on CQC. So now CT updates the doc with all kinds of great new info, again regardless of the source and it doesn't change on CQC. So now people who frequent CQC don't have the benefit of the latest info. Is that really better than maybe having stickies on other websites simply linking to a document or wiki or website or whatever somewhere else that stays updated? There are many people like yourself that frequent many forums and can make sure any great ideas get put into a popular linked location. A similar idea was done bu Upstatemike who built Google spreadsheets to try to consolidate data on HA and AV systems. I only suggest CocoonTech because CT was the first place to take the initiative to try to consolidate the info. Does AVS or CQC or RC have some sort of guide, or just maybe some stickies to find and read? So it's not important WHERE it is, just that people from all walks contribute great ideas and it's available to all newbs and others who need it. And the whole issue of copyright is for ALL of us, anyone that contributes. This is a team effort to keep this document or wiki or whatever great. Many people contribute to it. I would suspect none of the contributors would be too happy if a magazine or anyone suddenly comes out and tries to claim all that stuff as their own. It simply helps keep the information in one place like it should be but none of it is intellectual property.
And that's really all I care to say on this. If I am wrong I'm confident I will be told so, but I have a feeling there will be a ton of readers that would agree with this.
) so I wouldn't worry about a small hiccup!
