Maybe I am one of the guilty ones here. I have asked for help a few times as I am really struggling with codea and I admit to being slow to learn things that others pick up fast.
I always do try to thank the people that helped. I also always do try my best to figure things out myself but it gets really frustrating sometimes when I can’t seem to do what should be easy. I have tried my best recently not to post for help but sometimes it’s very hard when you spend 3-4 days on a problem you cannot solve and know people like Dave on here could probably give you the answer in a matter of minutes.
@Paul123 I don’t think you’re one of the guilty ones. As you said, you spent 3-4 days on a problem, then asked, which means you’re trying. This post was originally started because of the rash of posts by users who didn’t seem to want to take the time to try. They were after someone to write the code for them, which I don’t mind doing, just give all the information up front, not line by line. Then there were multiple discussions for the same thing, which brought out more negative responses than positive. Everyone here has a choice whether to respond to a question or not, to give example code or not, but if someone wants a positive response, don’t tell people to respond, but ask.
@Paul123 as dave said this doesn’t include people like you who make the effort to educate themselves, it’s the people who think that they’ll learn by reading code that other people have made for them without even trying to tackle the problem themselves. This won’t work as you have no way to compare the code people have made to your own if there is no code you’ve tried with. I don’t have problems writing an example for someone who needs to know a long press function or something along the lines of, but if they’re constructing a code behind the scenes by asking multiple questions about different parts of their idea/game then that’s bad :-q
@andymac3d We have this already, sort of. The problem is all discussions get posted to the front page. I’m not sure how easily TLL can manage their thread organizer but instead of the latest topic to be posted on have the hottest topic (views/replies/average time between replies) then make the split between topics more defined so have subsections for questions and examples for new people to thrive in.
@Luatee - I think the Vanilla community forum engine can easily support all sorts of clever organisational structures such as this and is completely configurable.
It might be nice to allow people to add a bit more information about themselves on their ‘profile’ - this might help users gauge other peoples level of experience (and age!) before responding. The current ‘About’ section is becoming a bit long in the tooth - I think it would be interesting to have a little bit more info on there such as where they are, a brief bio and perhaps a web-page/blog if they have one.
@andymac3d That’s great if the community gets larger then to organize the topics. I think if it does get big that there should be titles set by moderators possibly so new users can recognize what each person is good at, so if we have someone like space monkey who was good at the 3D would have that in their title… Someone who does UI design would have that and so on… I agree with you on the current about section, if you want it to stay being a community instead of a wide forum then people should be keen to introduce themselves.
I think the forum is fine just the way it is. It’s just that some users want to take a shortcut and don’t want to spend the time looking thru the other posts. As for organizing the topics, we already have that. It’s on the right side of the forum page under Categories. Maybe we just need more of them there (new users, suggestions, etc). I haven’t tried it yet, but can the category of an existing post be changed. If we get more catagories, maybe existing posts can be redirected to show up in a new category that might be of help to the new users.
@dave1707 That’s what I was thinking, it seems that topics are quite organised, but there are too many that just get put under general. I think it would help with organisation if we had sub-categories, for example a finished code section for people who have projects they have finished then a wip section. Have a questions section like we do now but maybe categorise the questions… It would make the viewing a lot cleaner as you have to go through pages to find a topic you saw the other day.
