Stickies

I asked the other mods about conglomerating the stickies a while back, maybe into one big "forum rules" post.

But people don't read rules. It's a fact of life. It's a great way for us to boost our post count though

/edit

maybe on the signup page they can't create an account until they've read a forum rules page?

People don't read
neither do I

especially not sticky notes, because they usually are the same pretty much everywhere telling you not to be abusive and such. FAQ, stickies, I'd rather have an answer to the question in person.

especially not sticky notes, because they usually are the same pretty much everywhere telling you not to be abusive and such. FAQ, stickies, I'd rather have an answer to the question in person.

eh? that's the problem though isn't it, don't care to read rules designed to help and keep a ordered happy forum, can't be bothered to search previous posts for a solution, can't be bothered etc etc, so much easier to just post the question and avoid any tedious work on ones part.

On every single bloody forum I ever visit the first thing I do is read all the informational posts in that forum, all forum rules and stickies.

true.

then again, every answer can be found with google, so what would the point of a forum be?

the bad thing about tutorials and other how-to's is that often you get so much information while all you need is a little pointer, or you get so much options which you don't need, that it's a waste of time trying to figure out which part exactly it is that you need.

sure validation is important, and half of the newbs don't validate, or don't even care to validate. but that's how I started too. it's better when a person tells you what to do, than a tutorial telling you what to do, because hardly the end result of the tutorial is exactly what you want, while the person will look at your problem and help you with flaws that are found in your work.

I disagree with this statement, there's hundreds of different ways a problem can occur and no matter how many tutorials and forum posts already available on Google it's quite easy for someone to have a new spin on an old problem. That's surely the point in a forum, one's like this anyway - they're like an ever expanding knowledge base.

I don't think that someone just telling you to do it a certain way is the best way. Often a new coder will not know exactly what it is they're looking for so a veteran can point them in the direction of an article which will help them to learn. Also, what makes a forum like this particularly good is that there's people who are bothered about making people better coders - people like Hugo, Tyssen and TPH et al often try to explain to newbies why they're telling you to do something and what it will do rather than just throwing some code at you.

No your premise is wrong, it presumes that to some extent the people helping are somewhat automated and and have nothing better to do than 'Teach' this is not a 'Teaching' forum it's a help forum and it is presumed that people have covered the basics that are required in advance, it is the death of forums such as this when they have to constantly re-iterate the same basic advice, advice that has been repeated over and over and if people were to follow some of the age old 'Best Practises' in this case 'Lurking' that is, the proscribed approach to take before the actual sign up to a forum with the aim of soliciting help, done in order that the person may familiarise themselves with the forum ethos, absorb posts and possibly gain answers through previous posts, then constant repetition would be mitigated to some extent. Entirely the wrong approach is to jump in to a 'Help' forum blindly just because one has a problem that is easier resolved by asking someone else than perhaps doing a few searches, reading a few threads, or attempting some obvious basic debugging.

I quite understand that it seems better that one gets some one to one advice but it's vital that people appreciate that this advice is someone's time and experience and that time and experience should not be wasted on some question that can be resolved through a little effort on the part of the poster. Forums are not a shortcut to learning the basics.

In truth what is meant to happen is that when a poster clearly has not considered or bothered to ask a question in an appropriate manner or failed to take note of the basic requirements before posting then that post is supposed to go unacknowledged, this is supposed to be a prompt that the poster must re-think their question and ask themselves why they have not received replies, yet this does seem on the face of it a harsh and slightly uppity attitude.

most things however are best learned from experience, or well that is my best way of learning things.

by being active on a forum you see problems and answers, and yes there are always double questions. things you fixed the day before are asked by someone else the next day. but does that mean that a forum should act as a redirect page where the answers are links to other documents? or that we expect people to read these documents before they ask questions?

I don't think it's realistic that people who are asking questions are supposed to know all or a lot of the basics. And especially with CSS, where you need to know really a lot before you can start using it decently (especially when moving away from tables, think 100% height, think floats, think blocklevel elements, all those things.. everything is thoroughly connected with each other), there are so many unexpected things. The only way to really master this is to try, and keep trying, and listen to what people tell you, and to keep asking.

I think redirecting people to previous threads or documents and tutorials is a bit impolite. A personal approach gives a person a nice and warm feeling, maybe causing the user to return to the boards (as we all know a lot of people register, ask their question, and are gone again the moment they have an answer).

But yea, I have to agree that some things are hard to deal with. People using tables, no doctypes, maybe some invalid HTML (which doesn't always have to be a problem for CSS to work properly).

Stickies. Yeah I don't know. FAQ, Forum rules.. I do agree at some point, but don't at others.

I'll think about it some more.

The problem I have with forums and stickies isn't the fact that people don't search for the answers. In case of our forum, there are thousands upon thousands of pages, and in most cases newbies wouldn't know what to search for anyway.

I don't mind that people don't search, what I do mind is people ignoring the help that is available for them.

Newbies do not know about doctypes and valid code. In fact one of my first posts here, believe it or not, was something along the lines of "you don't need a doctype"

As said above, people like myself do not want to give people a simple fix, we want to imporve them as coders. However we cannot do this until they have the basics in place - a doctype and valid code. I got fed up of repeating myself in every topic with "get a doctype" so I made the stickies, which are subsequently ignored.

That's what frustrates me

No it's not impolite at all, think about this for a second.
This board was always predicated on the basis of it's friendliness and most importantly it's aversion to the technical scripters disdain that is all too common on technical boards - at least that was the general idea in discussion with Tony in the early part of the forums life and the reason I bothered to help as much as I have.

This relaxed attitude though does not mean that we should allow bad behaviour or laziness or 'Forum Vamps' to ride roughshod over our good nature.

Directing people to resources does not cast a bad impression, we are not here to hold everyone's hands, although we do so and have done for all the time I've been posting to a higher degree than many forums.

You imply above that a lot of people ask and never return due to not having a good experience , well I can assure you that this is not the case and I resent that implication somewhat. Many people do not return because they have got what they wanted and couldn't give a hang about the forum or it's community, we are but a convenient service for them, these people are known as Forum Vamps, named in an very amusing but apposite article. you only have to consider the number of posts that simply never get a resolution from the OP or a simple 'thanks that has worked' If I look through my posts I can tell you that roughly 50% go un-thanked and is truly the worst of crimes as it directly says that our time is not appreciated or that in some way we are obliged to provide this help. It never ceases to amaze me the posts I make that are detailed and have involved me spending a fair bit of my time working out a solution that when posted is never ever replied to! why have I wasted my time helping someone like that with such a poor attitude and lack of manners? beats me!
but I still do as I the ones that can be bothered to respond make it worthwhile and I believe in the spirit of these help forums.

So please don't confuse people posting once with having lost someone due to creating a bad feeling generally those such people were never here for anything other than a quick answer, if they are not happy with being directed to a previous explanation or solution that really is their problem not ours. I've got over 8000 posts to my name have a wonder how many of those are about float containers, and also wonder how many times I have replied in depth on the subject?, it is simply not possible to re-iterate such information in such depth every other post and is one of those cases where direction to the resource that will help them learn is frankly more than sufficient help, these are matters to be learnt they aren't really problems they are just a lack of required knowledge, which we all have been through.

That's the reason why I first started writing articles on my own site - cos I was too lazy to keep typing out the same stuff on forums (then I got too lazy to write new articles :rolleyes:). If pointing someone to a pre-existing resource that I think will answer the question makes me seem impolite, I'm happy to live with that.

no I didn't mean that they were not coming back because they weren't feeling appreciated here but like you said, when they have what they came for, they are gone again.

We are lucky to have the regulars around, the forum pretty much relies on these people since they are the only ones with the real knowledge. I, for one, have all the regulars to thank for my current css knowledge. And even though I know how to handle myself fairly well these days, I can't possibly take on the role you guys do. I think this is the reason I'm afraid or something, that one day all good guys will retire, and no one has come to take their place because most visitors are Vamps, who don't feel any need to assist people.

That in fact is not always expectable, people who create a site once or twice in their entire life just need it to work and don't care much about why or how.

I actually get lost in trying to figure out what I want to say. I can't find the words I guess but something is bothering me.

That itself is not really a problem maybe. I think if people would remain in touch with csscreator, but see it's a specific piece of work (as in not a forum topic), things could be worked out nicely.

CSScreator articles/blogs/tutorials for the win. Everyone should be able to contribute, checkup by mods who approve, disapprove, etc. the feel should be different than a usual topic, to give it more impact.

This is the main reason why I stopped posting regularly. I spent a lot of time in one particular week, giving detailed CSS help and site design analysis. No one bothered to reply. Not one 'thanks' or acknowledgement of the time I had given to their problem or issue. It's rude and demoralising and it happens too much for my liking. Now I just linger and chip in the odd comment now and then, but I was once a far more active member. Ho hum.

Do you want to know how I got so many posts and became so well-known here?

Repeating the same damn thing every single day.

Roy you slacker, get active again before we ban you from ever coming back here again

Unless someone replies to a thread after I have and it pops up again as having unread replies, I don't even remember most of the threads I've replied to. You guys just need worse memories.