Tree structure for 'Ask A Pro' and 'Tutorials'

Currently the Ask A Pro section is filled with thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of questions, the majority of which are redundant. If the forum were to be organized such that questions fall into a very specific category (more specific than that of topic tags) and given a collapsible tree structure (as seen in many IDEs with pkg mgmt or windows registry or notepad ++ … etc …) Then users would be far more willing to scower the pages for an appropriate answer rather than the forum being massivley clutter by having users asking a very specific yet, redundant question over and over across the board. For the Tutorials section, given this tree structure would also be highly beneficial as it would resemble the CC Wiki in structure but would be created by CC's users not creators. Another viable solution would be an adequate search bar but that poses less advantages compared to the tree format and to be fair, the forum's search mechanism is completely incompetent.

This does seems nice, but organizing thousands of posts will be hard. I still support your idea and might want to help organize it.

Most questions that get asked can be answered by the stickies, and if not there, by a basic web search.

Frankly I believe that the majority of new threads are made not because answers are hard to find, but rather because many people just aren't comfortable or interested in figuring things out for themselves. That said, experience also helps - you gain an intuition for spotting things to test that could answer your questions for you. Inexperienced users often incorrectly pick something they think is causing their symptoms, and would end up searching the wrong categories anyway. And then there's the language barrier some users have to deal with…

If people had to read through the likes of this before posting, there'd be a lot less questions. Unfortunately the main reason for that would be because they'd lose interest and go off to do something else.

Bomb Bloke, on 07 March 2016 - 07:07 AM said:

I don't completely disagree. If people took proper procedures before hand then yes, the count would greatly decrease. However, many of those who don't take the proper procedures do in fact know what they are but don't do it for what I believe to be the same reason that the forums moderators haven't already acknowledged and organized the forums. It's that its time consuming and they are too lazy to sift through thousands of posts (excluding forum moderators from here to the end of sentence) looking for a similar question with an adequate response. Its easier. People don't like change, but they love hypotheticals. If you don't have someone willing to put in the effort to make an idea a reality, then you're in the wrong place. Can a doer (for lack of better word) get on this topic?

Let's put it into perspective: Ask a Pro has 13.000 threads in it. A person alone will never be able to do this. But, if a team did it, it would be faster. The mods DO have to trust whoever sorts the threads because it is a great responsibility. If the forums had started the way you describe it, it may have been a thing, but with 13.000 post its close to impossible.

Don't get me wrong, I think the idea is great.

jacky500, on 08 March 2016 - 10:20 PM said:

It's that its time consuming and they are too lazy to sift through thousands of posts (excluding forum moderators from here to the end of sentence) looking for a similar question with an adequate response.

Thing is, no one has to do that sort of sifting - search engines handle that. The other day it was put to me in chat that I must have some great big text file somewhere documenting all the threads I keep linking to as references. I said "yep: I call it Google".

The way I see it, not only will old topics need to be sorted, but new ones will constantly need to be moved around as well. Users having problems with mod compatibility, for example, likely won't realise that fact (or else they usually wouldn't be posting in the first place), meaning that all their threads will initially go into either Bugs, General Help, or Errors & Handling… and need to be moved.

Users who are unable or unwilling to correctly search through thousands of threads tend to be just as unlikely to search through hundreds, or even dozens, of threads (and if you know how to search properly, volume is ironically still irrelevant). It's not too uncommon to see two different users with exactly the same question on the same page, posted within the same day. That doesn't just go for these boards, either - look most anywhere and you'll see the same user behaviour.

As it stands, the most recent threads in AaP include some guys who clearly haven't read the stickies (let alone read any Lua manuals / tutorials on basic debugging), a guy who's problem is evading all attempts at isolation and hence categorisation, a guy who necro'manced a thread from 2013 to ask the world's most generic question, and the rest would mostly be classed under Errors or General or both. And that's ok. ComputerCraft is a mod for learners and kids, and it's expected that most asking about it are going to be less than competent.

But it does indicate that the main impact from a re-shuffle would likely be a steady influx of "work for the sake of work". Changing the boards won't change its users.

The above post provides a good summation of why this change is extremely unlikely to happen, with extra emphasis on the "work for the sake of work" bit.

Perhaps when a new thread is being created for these sections, a live search can also be happening at the same time, showing threads that have a similar title to the current one about to be created.

This way, the person can know if a similar tutorial has been done before, or if a similar question has already been asked.

Unless it already does that. I wouldn't know.

Detective_Smith, on 09 March 2016 - 01:40 AM said:

Unless it already does that. I wouldn't know.

Later versions of IPBoard can pull stuff along these lines, but I can't remember whether they do it before a thread is even posted. I'd imagine there's an extension which adds the functionality, but actual board updates and feature tweaks are all in Dan's hands.

Detective_Smith, on 09 March 2016 - 01:40 AM said:

Perhaps when a new thread is being created for these sections, a live search can also be happening at the same time, showing threads that have a similar title to the current one about to be created.

Like stackoverflow does? That'd be really nice.

I'm not sure how stackoverflow does it, but I'll take your word for it that it's nice.