In the menu bar near the top of the forum the last item is 'FAQ', which I think most people think stands for 'Frequently Asked Questions'. The trouble is there are no questions there. What there is instead is a guide to forum etiquette.
I propose that this be changed to something more suitable, and @pert has agreed to change it if we can come up with something we agree on.
My proposal is either 'FORUM ETIQUETTE', or if that is too long 'ETIQUETTE'.
Other suggestions welcome and encouraged.
I will moderate this topic and remove anything too off topic.
But would it also be worth also having an actual FAQ section - with answers to (some of) the most frequently asked question / most frequently encountered problems ... ?
It is important to keep this label as short as possible. The reason is that if the window dimension is smaller than will allow for the display of all these navigation items in the header, none of them are displayed:
So any increase in the content of this section of the header can cause less users to see the important link makes it less likely that all users will see the important link.
Of course the benefits of using a label that more accurately communicates the content of the targeted page can outweigh the inevitable harm that will come with increasing the content of the header, but we should at least try to reduce the harm by finding an appropriate label that does not add excessive quantity of header content.
Something that should be decided is what is the intended scope for this document? "Etiquette" fits the current content fairly well, but might be limiting for the addition of other valuable information. I think it would be worth considering merging the contents of How to get the best out of this forum with the "FAQ" document. This would have the benefit of making the important information currently stored in How to get the best out of this forum much more visible to the users (there are several other prominent links to the "FAQ" document in addition to the one on the header). There is already significant redundancy between the content of the two documents. There is an etiquette section in How to get the best out of this forum, but not all the information there is related to etiquette.
A label with a broader scope would be "Guide". It also happens to be quite short. This would be appropriate if the scope of the document currently referred to as "FAQ" was to be a guide to use of the forum (similar to the scope of How to get the best out of this forum.
The "FAQ" page is already referred to in some parts of the forum UI as "guidelines", and in fact even has an alternative URL with that name:
I propose to immediately place at the top of the forum guide:
See also FAQ - Arduino Forum for general rules on forum behaviour and etiquette.
I suggest this as a temporary measure until something more permanent has been decided.
If the two documents are merged then maybe it makes sense to place a link in place of 'FAQ' as well as leaving the current links at the top of every forum section.
I also think it would be best to continue the established practice of having a pinned topic in every category linking to the user guide document (regardless of where that document happens to be hosted) in order to further increase the visibility of this important information to the users.
A change from FAQ to ETIQUETTE will influence the header line, but I don't think it will have a big impact on the readability in such small screen resolutions. Such narrow screens don't scale very nicely today anyway:
first window when all headers disapper
second window a little bit larger up to the size where I think even ETIQUETTE might be readable.
if one could omit the counters after NEW and UNREAD for small resolutions
or make a smaller padding between these links
or let the Arduino Logo disappear
or make "FORUM" smaller
like it happens with the change from ARDUINO to ARDUINO.CC or the size of the search bar -
problem solved
