Hi all,i find way to much time here reading threads looking for answers to a problem,after ages reading thru them they never reach a conclusion but are left mid air,how about a marker on the thread title letting ppl know an answer was found or deleting inconclusive threads after say 2 weeks for example,would save lots of wasted time and your hard drive space,what do folks think?,i see a few forums with the same issues its not just this one,let me know your views on the idea,cheers Paul m3-vuv.
m3vuv:
how about a marker on the thread title letting ppl know an answer was found
There is already a convention for this described in the "How to use this forum - please read." sticky that's at the top of each forum section:
Unfortunately, not many people follow it. I think a lot of the people who post on this forum think "aargh, it's been two minutes and still no reply, I guess I should try Google", find the answer immediately there, since a million other people asked the same thing already, and never bother coming back to the forum thread to let us know they already found a solution.
m3vuv:
or deleting inconclusive threads after say 2 weeks for example
That would be a huge amount of work for the moderators. We get a LOT of posts on this forum and they'd need to review every single thread to determine whether it qualified for deleting. It's not always a solved/not solved binary. The poster may have gotten their answer but not bothered to make the effort to say thanks. Maybe the problem wasn't solved, but useful information was shared that might be helpful to others. Also, it's amazing how some people will come back and reply after months, either because they didn't have time to do it before, or never got a notification of the replies.
The fact is that forums are a terribly inefficient way of storing knowledge. There is an incredible amount of valuable information in this forum, but it's all jumbled together in a massive mess. You might prefer the Stack Exchange system:
pert:
The fact is that forums are a terribly inefficient way of storing knowledge. There is an incredible amount of valuable information in this forum, but it's all jumbled together in a massive mess. You might prefer the Stack Exchange system:
https://arduino.stackexchange.com/
Forums are a lot more enjoyable than stackexchange. (IMHO)
...R
I really like the idea of Stack Exchange, but it sort of breaks down when the people asking questions don't bother to learn how it works or follow the rules. The average person asking questions about Arduino doesn't seem to be very good at doing those things.
My primary interest is in sharing knowledge and helping people. I'd like to do that as efficiently as possible. The forum works for this purpose, but is quite inefficient. Stack Exchange has the potential to be more efficient because the idea is more towards there being a single question, around which all the contributed answers are collected and ranked. That way, it becomes more of an informational resource for others with the same question. The forum is much more about the same question being asked over and over again, with varying qualities of answers. I think some people just really prefer the one-on-one feel of the forum. I understand that everyone has different styles of learning and I'm definitely willing to take the forum approach, but there are a lot more people with questions than people with answers.
pert:
but there are a lot more people with questions than people with answers.
Google finds most of my answers - including on Stackexchange
And now that you remind me, I have a problem with the combination of Google and Stackexchange. Sometimes the whole first page of Google responses comes from Stackexchange when I would much prefer a broader source of information to choose from - the 2 most popular from Stackexchange and then the most popular other sources.
I also find the Stackexchange answers generally very narrow - fine if the code presented does what I want, but difficult to extrapolate from for other purposes due to the lack of discussion.
…R
pert:
but it sort of breaks down when the people asking questions don't bother to learn how it works or follow the rules.
It also breaks down when...
-
The question is even a little ambiguous. I've seen such questions get removed.
-
The question does not have a simple direct answer (e.g. "How do I sort a Python list?" versus "How do I get my animatronic gorilla head working?") I've seen such questions get removed.
-
A moderator is in a bad mood.
Given the authors I suspect there is also a set of ridiculous rules that would drive me insane. I get enough of that puerile nonsense with my makerspace forum.