We just need a newbie forum where people can live when they first hear of the Pandora. The more knowledgeble members that don't mind answering the same, or a variation of the same, question every now and again can take care of the replies. Maybe a couple can volunteer to make sure questions get answered friendly.
At the top of that forum a FAQ should be stickied and someone, Blue Protoman perhaps, gets put in charge of making sure all the questions that pop up regularly are answered in there. That way at a certain point most recurring threads can be replied to with a link to the FAQ and a lock making sure it fades away fast.
Write up a pinned "Why the Pandora is the way it is" thread, and flash it brightly for all to see. [...] (It has to be on the forums, not enough people read the wiki.)
I agree that it has to be on the forum. However, I don't think that an /
additional/ sticky thread would help as long as it's about a specific topic, such as "Why the Pandora is the way it is". Because that logic would assume that another sticky thread would help against the problem of too many information sources (after all, the information IS already there, somewhere).
Please read the following quote:
One of the biggest problems this scene currently has is that while much information about the various devices that are being discussed is available, this information is scattered all over the internet in various flavors of usefulness and complexity. This situation confuses new users, which ultimately leads to even more cluttered information.
To stop this spiral movement and prevent further clutter in this forum, it would probably be helpful to aggregate the most profound information that can be found within posts of this forum in a single sticky thread in a useful way. However, the number of sticky threads this forum has is probably already too high to make people pay enough attention to any of them. When creating software, usability can often be increased by structuring a decision tree that is deep instead of wide. In other words, concolidating (some of) the sticky threads into one (and/or unstickying some of them) could help.
Recently, I initiated something on the German forums which I would also suggest for boards.openpandora.org : a "Forenindex" (~="board index"). It's a single sticky thread that should aggregate links to the most profound posts which are useful in the context of the topics that the forum revolves around. It serves two specific purposes:
- The likelihood of someone asking a common question (such as which SD card(s) to buy, what screen protector to use, if the Pandora should have had a hinge similar to that of the Nintendo DS (links to various screen adjustment hacks that were posted on the forum) or wether the Pandora's NAND can wear quickly) decreases.
- The fact that through the existence of a board index as a single sticky thread it gets WAY easier to find some of the posts containing profound information that are spread across the board increases the chance that someone will add that information to the wiki (which is the place that all information should be headed to).
Number 2) is the reason for why a board index makes sense even though it comes close to being a quirky kind of wiki itself. The board index of forum.gp2x.de is currently at v0.0.0.1 , whenever it changes I will increase the version number and post a diff into a dedicated thread so people can easily follow the changes and updates.
Source:
http://boards.openpandora.org/index.php?/topic/3273-do-you-think-id-make-a-good-moderator/page__view__findpost__p__56829
How is this different from any FAQ thread? Unlike FAQ threads, the board index isn't meant to give answers itself. Rather, it is meant as THE single starting point when looking for information on this board. To take the aforementioned hypothetical FAQ thread as an example, the board index would have a link to that. By reducing the number of existing stickies through un-stickying /
some/ threads and instead linking to them from the board index (and also to the still-stickies, since they are useful and the board index is meant to link to every useful resource that can be found within this forum), you can make sure that new users understand that the board index is the place to start when looking for information /
that can be found on boards.openpandora.org /.
Since for every question that gets asked frequently there probably already exists a good post that answers the question in a sane, understandable and at least largely comprehensive way (~="useful"), these posts can be linked to from the board index in case a question is being asked TOO frequently. By making sure that only answers that are useful are being linked to in the board index, you can prevent an explosion in the number of links that the board index provides as well as let people know that all links in there are useful (which further increases the chance that people will look there when hunting for information and/or point other people there). (For instance, if a new question is being asked several times a day but no one has created a post that answers that question in a useful way, then the board index does not have a link to an answer because there is none that would fit the board index' minimum link quality.)
Plus, it is different from an FAQ thread because it does NOT create any new information itself except for the list of useul information that's alread there, and thus can be a first step to consolidating the existing information by making useful information more easily findable without actually creating new information. As described in my quote above, this way it can help with bringing information from this board to the wiki.
They
could ignore such threads, but
will they? At least this way their responses will be this;
Check this thread out, it'll explain everything.
...rather than this;
Did you even bother to look at the damned site? It says right there! Do your research before you come here asking silly questions!
See the difference? I could probably go more extreme. I don't think cracking down on our own will do any good. Taking away our reason to crack down on anybody is much better.
But such responses will not change. They can *already* do what you suggest - there is already extant documentation to link to (yes, granted, it's not all in one overview, and I do agree that that would be a very useful thing to have!
) that would allow for this.
Very few people would answer the latter to a question that hadn't been asked before. Seen the other way around, at least part of what makes people answer rudely is that some questions keep getting asked over and over, and I assume that that part is probably a relatively huge one.
There are mainly two reasons for why someone may be asking others for some information that a significant amount of people would describe as being "easy to find through searching". The first one is that the person doesn't bother looking for information himself/herself, and these people shouldn't really be replied to since just giving people who don't respect the time resources of others what they want will only make problems worse. Unfortunately, you sometimes can't say for sure if a person is just lazy. Maybe it's just the second reason, which is that information that is easy to find for those who already know where to look mustn't necessarily be easy to find for those who don't, even if (part of) the former group believes that the existing information must be sufficient for the latter group to find the desired information. Luckily, working on an improvement for reason two also helps with problem one.
-----
Sources will be cited by the best people to cite them from. (Who would you rather take an argument about the Pandora from; Joe Schmoe or WizardStan?) Such as this (this is just an example, there might be more to it);
I agree with the first part, however I can't (and don't want to) resist to say that names don't mean anything.
-----
And one last thing:
whenever discussing something on the intenet, keep in mind that the members of the respective discussion platform may live in various time zones. This is not just true for this thread or forum, of course. Prior to deciding anything on an internet discussion platform, it's a good idea to wait a sufficient amount of time before actually deciding or beginning to implement. People on the other side of the globe may have something to contribute.
This is the reason for why this post may not be very well written and/or understandable, for which I'm sorry - I don't have much time right now. You may now call me names for posting something of mediocre quality. I'll have to start since I despise people who publish information in a rush: I'm an idiot and you should never ever read even parts of this post.
