It's now several times a week, sometimes multiple times a day, that some new user posts a question in the tutorial section. Is there a way to prevent someone with fewer than x posts from starting a topic in the tutorial section?
Hope springs eternal.
Makes sense to me.
I wonder if the forum software supports a setting like that.
There might be experienced Arduino users who did never visit the forum before or nevet posted; you are excluding those from posting a useful tutorial.
Each sub forum already has a brief description that you can see if you hover the mouse over the sub forum name. It should be displayed in big, bold letters when you initiate a posting sequence. Maybe with a question, "Does this describe your request?".
if you make the limit small, for example, 10 posts on the forum - experienced users who come to post a tutorial, I think, will figure out how to overcome it.
And if not, does the forum need such authors? 
This.
But, for me, the operative question is whether or not it's possible. If so, the only thing lacking is the will.
The ability to teach is entirely separate from the ability to do. Teachers refine what they are hearing while they are listening. I have known teachers who can explain a concept back to another teacher in a more clear, concise and accurate form than was presented to them. It's called the Cellini touch.
I worked with a guy who had 25 years of seniority, which was actually 2 months experience repeated 150 times. Experience does not guarantee ability, or ability to explain clearly.
An instructor with no arms could raise a pool player one level in one night ( clueless banger, shot maker, centerball position player*, Artist & Gunslinger** ) if he understood the concepts and had the verbal skills to convey that knowledge
** Artists & Gunslingers control the leave by hitting the cueball off center, and knowing the effect of that on both the object ball and the cueball. When they miss, their opponent always ends up with a leave so bad someone writes a country song about it, and the only way out is to fire the cue ball into a cluster and break the table open for the Artists & Gunslingers.
A problem with a somewhat reasonable solution: Auto-flag posts to the tutorial section.
I believe Discourse does have a "requires review" feature. ... Yup. This appears to be that. ... As far as I can tell the moderators cannot effect that change. And, there does not appear to be a way to beetlejuice the @admins. Calling @pert.
I think in the unlikely case of that happening someone with enough intelligence to create a worthwhile tutorial would easily be able to bring their difficulties to the attention of the moderators and ask for help.
As a brand new user. Totally devoid of any knowledge on any thing like this before can i make a comment from the other side of this fence.
I totally see dougp view, if there is a video on how to paint a door blue there is no need for anyone to ask how to paint a door blue and in fact all doors and all colours of paint is now dealt with in full. Any newbie asking for paint or door questions should be shot and then hung (twice) for asking a question already answered.
I see the same temperament and questions of banning newbies posts on most forums and most web sites.
Here’s the view from my side of the fence.
I have zero experience on anything digital . I am a dinosaur in age and mind set. I certainly pre date computers at home and easily remember the £1000 fee i paid to buy a 286 computer and hundreds of data disks that came with it. I have never paid a video game, in any shape or form.
The biggest issue by far with the ban all newbe questions falls apart at my side of the street, Extremely easily.
All the blue door painting experts can not understand how to communicate the information on painting to a level that a novice would understand. Just because you know the information in the video does not mean that i do. I have spent many weeks now in the tutorials section and some of the teachers are terrible, their forms of explanation needs explanations. The videos sections on you tube are also filled with expert tutorials.
As i say to people on this topic. "you are to intelligent to think at my lower level" In fact i would go to say that you are unable to think at my lower level and even less so able to communicate that information.
There’s teachers and then there are teachers!!
Ban the newbies , i don’t mind. build a newbie fenced off area , i don’t mind. make all newbies sign to say they will watch 50 hrs of videos and read 1,000 articles before allowing them the ability to ask a question and i will still ask a question so impossibly low that someone would kick off and complain.
This is my second ever post under this account. I have been here for several weeks now hiding and reading and watching.
My first post;
Was actually asking for a tutor or paid processional help to explain or build what i desire. Purely because the information in the whole of this forum and especially ALL OF THE TUTORIALS section was not of any use explaining what i need to know or to answer my questions. I have read hundreds of people questions and posts and sometimes they get the answer they were looking for , a huge amount i would say at least 70% of the posts on this forum and especially the face book groups which are prearticular nasty and troll filled biles of hate, NEVER GET A SENSIBLE ANSWER!! or certainly not one that answers the question.
Or should that read the answers i see and read do not correspond with what i think the question was asked about. After all each of us reads a question to mean a certain point and we answer to that point. I am answering Dougb point to ban newbes and I agree with this point. But the failure is that there is no beginners section free from harm to ask these question and the information within the tutorial section does not answer any of my questions.
In fact a throw a challenge down to any of the tutorials and you tube masters and all the rest of them. Do a teams meeting and video record my questions and answer my questions and see from my side of the fence how far off from the point you are.
I am reading up on RGB programmable light systems and and ws2812b and ESP32 controllers ect and if you have written or videoed or pod casted on anything to do with that I send this message to you.
Can we have a video on all the items you missed and fluffed and skipped over please. You missed so much and produced a video copying the guy before with the same bad information that you coppied the worst copy ever.
Where was this proposed?
if you have zero experience on the subject, then you need to study not from tutorials and videos, but start with base textbooks on programming and electronics.
And don't expect it to be fast. Entering a new area can take years
You are confusing two issues:
Can we have a video on all the items you missed and fluffed and skipped over please.
You are posting in the wrong place. The "youtubers" don't participate much here. Some of the helpers here have produced books and videos, but most are technical types that are more into actual R&D and design, and just read and answer questions. A few have written tutorials, but of course those don't have the leverage of YT algorithms to garner 1,000,000 views.
You made some interesting points, although you had difficulty staying on your own topics.
Actually, one of your suggestions has already crossed my mind, an extreme nooby or "sandbox" sub forum.
I am a trained educator, so I am so familiar with the issue of "gap filling" between expert and novice. The problem with your paint example, it's a bit of a "straw man" because it glosses over (pardon the pun) the ease/difficulty of painting. A true blue paint challenge would be failed by a novice, and the expert painter actually has a collection of skills and facts that contribute to a successful job.
In electronics/computers just as in painting, the skills and knowledge have to be built up in progressive stages. It applies to both learning and teaching.
You can not ask Albert Einstein to explain general relativity to you. Well actually, he tried with a book he wrote. The question is, on what level do you seek to understand it? If you watch the one hour documentary you feel better off, but not able to answer scientific questions about it, e.g. "what would happen if two spaceships travelling in opposite directions at the speed of light meet?" and so on.
It is not the educators fault, if the student demands to go from arithmetic to calculus in one day. That is the flavour of a lot of newby posts.
Another point, yes the internet is now a dumpster. It's hard to tell who really knows and who doesn't. But the more you stick with those who know, the more you will be able to tell the difference. How to tell in the beginning? Look at credentials. Read official and original documentation. Don't understand it? That is only because you skipped over important fundamentals. Study, tutorials and experimentation are required. So don't be sucked in by fancy presentation, rather look at the authenticity of your sources.
The forum introductory threads contain lists of links to those resources, not all but a very good collection to get started. Unfortunately, and by the way it is often the reason why a noob gets a rough ride with the responses, is that they are too lazy to follow the necessary learning process. They really just want someone to get them out of a jam that they self manufactured with their own apathetic, needy approach to work.
There is no cure for human stupidity, because it is limitless. Doesn’t matter what you do, someone will post there asking for tutorial
I think that you missed the point of this topic as well as what the Introductory Tutorials section is for.
We often try to determine what kind of person a beginner is. Therefore we often give pointers. If the topic starter gives some form of feedback ("based on your advice I tried this circuit/code but it does not work as expected") that he/she tried, most of us are very willing to explain where he/she went wrong and correct the errors.
Some of us put great (or maybe even extreme) effort in a post to explain the thinking behind a solution when providing a solution. It sometimes takes me a day to write a reply (including writing software and testing). Sometimes it's worth the effort, sometimes not.
Most of us ain't teachers so the success rate varies.
Often, this is because the question is critically flawed, assumes some fact or theory that isn't true, or lacks sufficient depth or resolution such that an answer probably wouldn't match what the questioner has in mind.
In that case, some answers which appear to be off topic, are actually trying to corral the questioner into re-forming a question that is precise and meaningful enough to have a correct and relevant answer.
If we're pointing to the the tutorials as a first stop, and since many of them are long closed due to inactivity, maybe there's a case for keeping discussions in the tutorials section open for questions about their interpretation or application.
If someone has a question about why the professional painter does it the way they do it, or why they said to do it this way, the discussion under the tutorial seems like the place to ask questions.
This just leaves the opportunity open to pollute the tutorial with what are often trivial questions resulting from not reading the tutorial closely enough.
Let them open a new question and link the tutorial instead:
I was reading this tutorial about xyz, and I don't understand how to...
It's a tutorials' section, not really a discussion section. The questions asked should advance the tutorial, rather than require a retelling.
A post was split to a new topic: Para que las entradas analógicas de mi Arduino puedan usarse como entradas digitales
A problem with a somewhat reasonable solution: Open the tutorial of interest, click the link graphic (
), click New Topic, then continue creating a new topic of discussion for the tutorial.