Generally Toxic and non informative

Community Website and Forum
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I am sorry to say it but this community has clearly lost some great people over the pandemic.

It now seems to be full of trolls and/or people who have no care for teaching or improving.
Only people that have their very narrow mindset on how things should be taught and if anyone else gets involved to help teach they will intentionally throw their ego into the spokes to cause people to fall off.

To the moderators. Don't let this stand, put them in thier place. Remind them without the people to teach and learn, this forum is nothing. Even if it takes a temp account suspension. You can clearly see who these people are and their attitudes on thier profile posts.

I came here looking for help and i got a cascade of negative stupid questions in return. My question was simple enough, two people where willing to help by dming me.

What does it say that the people who actually like teaching people don't use your forums! They prefer to DM to keep the answers off of the topic post because they also know that big ego will come and take a hot steaming turd on whatever answer they give.

Knowing something and not sharing it doesn't make you smarter than everyone else. It makes you a jackass living in a world of dumbasses. Congrats you're contributing to failure of humanity.

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Please provide a link to that topic. DM me if you don't want to identify it here

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if you are talking about this thread (painful to read) what you were asked for is an English language functional specification for the gig you wanted to build as it became clear the title of your post was highlighting an XY problem.

there was a eureka moment when you provided the video of what you want to replace but you did not offer enough details on how the "small box" you were trying to replace was working

without those details it was hard for those who wanted to help to be able to provide guidance

I watched the thread but did not contribute as there was enough confusion already there :slight_smile:

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Hello pathogenex

Thank you very much for the nice compliment, which I gladly return.

You have the option to ignore the users you do not like.

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@pathogenex,
I'm sorry you found your experience unpleasant, having read most of the topic in question here is my opinion for what it's worth:

The people on this forum are from all over the world, and sometimes it's not obvious where they are from. Between different nationalities and cultures and within different nationalities and cultures there are different ways of doing things and what is acceptable in one might be thought inconsiderate in another. I'm not going to reveal my prejudices by giving examples but I'm sure if you think about it you can think of your own. In that topic I see lots of people doing their best to help you and some degree of misunderstanding going both lots of ways. Please do consider that the people trying to help are giving up their free time to help you and that they most likely have a very different background to you. In my opinion as a moderator I see nothing in that topic to moderate, but, if you do not agree with me and are unhappy with the way you are treated then please either flag your concerns to the mods or if you feel comfortable with a particular mod, including me, then send a PM. We don't promise to agree with you but we will take a look.

Good luck with your project.

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Thanks a lot.

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However, this topic is becoming toxic. Any more posts like the ones I've just deleted will result in an intermission for the person posting the comments.

Please keep it clean and help @pathogenex , not make this the perfect example of the kinds of things he's talking about.

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Dear pathogenex.

maybe I am rude and a newbie here but I really don't understand you. what's the point of this discussion? You have a problem with your code, so you ask the question and wait for feedback. I am sure that even tho some of the replies weren't as helpful as you hoped. Some did have a meaning and you got what you needed, so why would you concentrate on the stuff of who says what and how?

one suggestion: This is sometimes difficult but writing structural code helps, when you ask a question about a 200 lined sketch, it's is difficult for people to identify the problem. your question becomes more like a rubik's cube. Try writing short code blocks, find the root of the problem, and then if you can't understand how to fix it, you have to come to a forum. Asking questions like "what is wrong with my code" is unhelpful.

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1: this forum is highly oriented towards posing your question in a particular, specific, narrowly described fashion: read the how to post questions guide, word your question in an unambiguous fashion, use correct spelling and syntax, post the code in code tags, include the schematic, et cetera. Heavy on RTFM ( Read The Fine Manual )

ponder the fact that the compiler also needs the exact same things for the exact same reasons and it becomes clear why this is the case.

2: the board helps those who help themselves. if you are capable of organizing your facts and observations well enough to pose a cogent, lucid, well articulated question, you should be able to determine the answer for yourself. like that scene in "The Hunt For Red October", when Alec Baldwin figured out how they would get the crew off the Soviet submarine by asking himself the right questions.

in theory. I don't live in theory, and neither do you.

in reality the manual is written by an engineer whose first language is not English. try this experiment: choose a translator web site, a song, and a language. translate the song from English to that language, then from that language back to English. I went with Buffalo Springfields "For What It's Worth", translated to and from Indonesian. It lost poetry, clarity and rythm in the process.

3: teaching is much harder that you think. if you have never done it, you have no idea. people learn in different ways. you have to design your lessons to teach visual learners, graphic learners, text learners, audio learners, all at the same time and at the same pace. people who believe themselves to be excellent teachers frequently only teach the way they learn, and are unaware of the different ways people learn. if you don't pick up on what they say in one go, you have a mental defect, in their mind. they are right about the mental defect, and about their mind, but they are missing something major.

4: my long term observation: if you post a question about a problem in a long and complex program, and you post only the code snippet you just added that makes the whole thing crash, someone always screeches "post the whole code in code tags". if you post the whole code in code tags, someone always screeches "do you expect us to search through 9,000 bytes of code to find your problem? post a code snippet!"

5: as in every forum everywhere, some people come to ask for help, some come to provide help,and some come to nitpick some tiny technical detail or obscure grammar rule, to demonstrate their self important self imagined superiority. note that the people who do that are never, ever the first person to reply to the OP.

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Another forum member introduced me to the correct way to handle this - an MRE (Minimal Reproducible Example). Since then, I've always asked for that, not requesting that the offending code be narrowed down (because, after all, if that were possible it would mean the problem is already found or almost found). It seems perfectly fair to me, asking for an MRE.

It is a form of narrowing down, but it's more directed than an attempt to essentially re-write 9000 lines of code.

It's also the most productive way to attack such problems, which is why the MRE wasn't invented here, it's an industry wide troubleshooting technique.

Lastly, a program that is structured well, lends itself more easily to the construction of an MRE since it's much easier to identify and isolate the problem area in that case.

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The concept of am MRE is covered in How to get the best out of this forum

consider that the longer your program, the harder it is for anyone to understand it and help you. For this reason, consider writing a short program that illustrates the problem and post or link to that instead. You are more likely to get help with a short, easy to understand program than with a long, complicated one. For more about this see How to create a Minimal, Reproducible Example .

But how many new users read the advice that they are directed to when they log on for the first time ?

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Yes, if you have 9000 lines of code and a bug somewhere then there is already a problem with how you are coding. You should be able to remove the last saved working iteration from the problem and be left with the bug being in the recent changes and thus confined to a few tens of lines of code, 100s at worst. A MRE should be easy to create from this

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I actually note that in my comment log. If I have "prog-101", and I'm ready to add features, I add something like

// 2022-07-25 latest working version

then save it out, rename it to "prog-102" which might have

// 2022-07-25 latest working version
// 2022-07-26 adding serial functions

It's brutally basic version control but it's all I need, and better than none.

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I tend to do very much the same thing but use incremental version numbers and long descriptions for the filename

"prog_102_added_serial_functions.ino"

That way I don't have to open the file to see what was added in each version

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In Windows, the utility WinMerge will hi-light all changes between two files or two directories. Often, the addition of code is not the real issue, but some side-effect to a global: array, struct, variable.

In my Linux work, I typically use Meld for file/directory comparison.

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I usually use Git. Commit often, and you're never more than two clicks away from a working version.
Additionally, you can easily diff your current version to the last working one. This is even more powerful in editors like VSCode with extensions for in-line Git annotations etc., which show at a glance which lines/functions/classes have changed, when, and by whom.

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I would do that but my file names are already crammed with names from the menagerie of different hardware they are using. :slight_smile:

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My file names include hardware and software plus versions so can read like a book!! I might have a name like “high power switching module relays-buttons-arrays and serial version 1.7 working”. To get to that I will also have “HPSM relays” and “HPSM buttons” and “HPSM buttons-arrays” each with their versions.

When I look back at a code name I can work out what I was thinking and can often find sketches that can be reused. I can even see when I learned some coding concepts like bit arrays

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Not negating anyone else's experience here, I've been a member for only a week. I've posted a few questions, and a couple of projects. The feedback I've received has been nothing but positive and informative.

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I reread all your posts; there is a common theme expressed: you are learning, your posts had code and inquiries were pertinent. You were appreciative of assistance and did not ping-pong from one issue to another within the same post.

Reading and attempting to follow guidelines for the forum provide a great way of beginning your forum journey, getting pertinent feedback, and generally having a positive experience.

Ray

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