New Help Me! Forum Rules Poll

[WILL]

I'm conducting a small poll with regards to the Help Me! forum. I would like to see what you guys think of the new rules. Do you think we will see an improvement or are they just a complete burden on the forums themselves?

Give us your feedback.

[jasonf]

Junk it, it's a waste of time. If someone wants help, they should use the appropriate section. At least then, people who know about that subject will be able to see it.

If a person doesn't know enough about what they're doing to post in the correct place, They probably don't know enough to understand the advice given to them.

Harsh, but likely.

A little more research in the area they're struggling with would help and then they could ask informed questions and get both answers and respect.


What can be solved by a misc help section anyway?
If the problem is Jedi-SDL, post in the JediSDL section,
If the problem is DelphiX, post in the DelphiX section,
If the problem is about cross platform compilation,
If you wanna talk about music, there's a music section

the forum could probably do with additional forums for OpenGL with pascal and DirectX with pascal as only the wrappers seem to get covered, but then there is always the Graphics forum.

Nuke it :twisted:

Press the button, you know you want to

[Traveler]

Ok, some numbers to see what we're talking about:

Total different categories: 45
Topics in Help me: 145
Categories with more threads than Help me: 7
Number of active topics within the last month in Help me : 15
Is there another category with a higher number of active topics: no
Which category comes next: General, with 10 topics
Next in line : Your Projects, with 8 topics

Number of active topics in Help me since rules : 9
Number of active topics in General since rules : 5

Question:
Suppose the help me category would be made inaccessible for new posts. What would most likely be the endresult?

My answer to the question posted by WILL.
No, I do not think we will see an improvement. It is most likely that General will become the next help me. I haven't posted in the help me since the new rules, but I can see why it would be a burden to both the poster as well as the moderators/staff to enforce them.

My vote would still be to remove the rules (and keep the help me).

[Robert Kosek]

I think the rules need to be removed too. I disagree with them anyway. If you think it's confusing or annoying then don't read it. There is no obligation for you to answer unless you want to, and if people stop having their questions answered then they might take a minute to think of a creative thread title.

Sometimes, the thread title is the hardest part to come up with. It isn't hard to describe a problem, but categorizing it can be difficult.

Do you want a nice community or a strict one of rulebook thumping mods?

[tpascal]

There are people that comes to the forum asking for Help, and there are people that comes to the forum just to see in what they can help;

It is true that nobody is forced to reply if one dislike or get anoyed about how some people poorly describe the problem when they are asking for help; but come on!, this is a forum and a community where you came expecting to share your experience, to ask and to be answered; so i think people that come to the forum should follow some basic rules that makes the visit pleasant; this also goes to the people that answer question; they have to be polite, if they dont know then dont invent the answer; if your are guessing then clearly say so in your post, etc.

Get anoyed for bad help asking is a normal nature for those who are expert in somthing; probably most you have seen this site: "How to ask question - The smart way":

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

[M109uk]

With all forums, your going to get visitors either posting in a generals thread or the first thread they see, its just they way things are and not much can be done about it, so personally im in favour of the rules.

Even though it will of course add more pressure to the moderators, the least we can do as a community is help keep the forums clean, in turn will help others find the help or posts needed. It is always good to have a thread where you can place a question in which your unsure of the category, with firm rules, or at least at the bottom if the list

[FNX]

I would keep that section for a couple of reasons:

1-Newcomers can be confused or afraid to ask or how to ask a certain
question and it is bad. This is a community forum and in a community
people is not supposed to be all high-level coding, so it's normal that
someone needs help. Also a newcomer can be unsure where to post
if there is no Help-me section.

2-Force the new rules as the standard for that section to teach how to
write properly on a forum like this (and this is what rules was created for)

3-If the help me forum is filled with stupid titled topics or requests, well,
those will get no answer just like it was until now...

4-Keep the General section "clean"

in other words, leave it all as it is now + rules

[Legolas]

And what about help requests posted in other sections? I'm thinking about a step-by-step form system (like the mantis one) for the "Help" section. Something like

Drop down lists:
1 - Select your OS... (Win32, Linux, MacOS, ...) Eg. Win32
2 - Select your video card (Ati, nVidia, ...) Eg.nVidia
3 - Select your API (DirectX, OpenGL,GDI,...) Eg. DirectX
4 - Select your wrapper (none, SDL, DelphiX, ...) Eg. DelphiX

Text fields:
5 - Insert a small description for your problem Eg. "I get a low frame rate"
6 - Long description "When I switch to 1280*1024*32 in my 486 I get a low frame rate"


It should be easy to put the question in the right section starting from the drop down list. :scratch:

[jasonf]

Although it's a good idea, I don't think that having dropdown menus would help at all in this situation.
It would turn the forum into some sort of support system.

We may as well use Bugzilla if that's the case.

It would take a fair amount of development to implement for use by a few new users until they find their feet.

The majority of the users wouldn't use them, they're not appropriate most of the time anyway.

I think that new users should be coached in the acceptable use of the forums. A little nudge here and there. So if we keep the help me section, they read an understand the rules, what the purpose of the help me forum is.

I still don't think we need it, but that's only my opinion which I've voiced once already (although, on re-reading, my comment was perhaps fairly insensitive.. for which I apologise.. bad stuff happening in my life atm)

I remember a time when Technomage and I used to share a house, it was my first foray into Pascal, I'd got quite a lot of development experience already but not in Pascal, it was the little things which I was getting stuck on. I'd always ask him, "How do I do this?" "How do I do that?" before even consulting the tomes of documentation I had sitting right by my side in the form of the Delphi development guides.. not to mention the internet.

In the end, he got fed up with this and told me "RTFM!" He was right, I'd got the answers right next to me, but it was easier to ask him and get a good explaination than look up the answers myself.. trouble was, I wasn't learning anything for myself.

After that day, I made a serious effort to learn under my own steam and I'm glad I did.

I'm not suggesting that the people using the Help Me forum are like this at all, but that sometimes you get Better knowledge by doing a bit more research, then asking the questions than just asking the questions and hoping someone else fully understands what you mean.

This site has a good community, who help with pretty much any subject on any level. I've seen sites where people post asking others to pretty much write their entire game for them and sites where the established users won't assist newer users. That doesn't happen here.

This is a great site.