What about a "Help" or "Support" Forum

[chackl]

Hello!
I just noticed that there is no specific sub-Forum for Help and Support - so users will post in general if they need support.
So what the suggestion if there is an own help-forum to get things organiced bette

Regards

[infuzion]

+ "Bugs" forum
+ "View Active Topics" is still broken since it does not show "General" msgs.

[tester]

Maybe this is the secret plan - if no "help" form here, then confused folks will flood the SM forum with zipped FSM's, which are incompatible with SM, and this will cause SM-ers to upgrade, to get rid of the mess

[trogluddite]

Maybe this is the secret plan

[support]

It's a good suggestion and we did consider a Help forum. However, the vast majority of posts are asking for help anyway.

If you look in DSP or General or any of the other forums except User Examples and Off Topic almost every post is a request for help or advice of some sort.

For this reason we've been considering going the other way and simplifying the forums so that we just have General, User Examples and Off Topic. That way General would effectively become the help forum.

For specific technical support or reporting bugs please email us on the support address above.

PS. view active topics should work now.

[tester]

Maybe "General Help" ?

I think the confusion is a result of lack of proper moderation. Don't get me wrong - moderators do a great job, it's just the management of topics. If "need help" topics were moved to to proper subforum (plus "sticky" information that this is done), then after a while - it should stabilize. Temporal marking, that posts were "moved to" could probably help too. On the other hand - changing years-long-habits needs time, and my guess is, that this may interfere in your marketing policy in some ways. How well well thigns are organized tells incoming guests what is the value of stuff.

The "General" description to me - is for ambiguous topics, with no specific reference.

Bug tracker (like "ideas and requests" in SM) would be good in a way, that these topics would not confuse other ones. While "help requests" are solvable between users, bugs and deficiencies depend on you and your updates, and you know how people like to talk about such things (while the downside is - these topics are brought on the top, covering all others).

Self-promote or self-advertise, or something like that - under careful moderation - would be useful. Not like "Projects". FS becomes more than sound, so semi-article like posts - could be good. For example - how do you convice schools to bring FS on board? But if there was a page about an entity that uses FS with robotics, and if such folks were interactive from that point on? Something like that.

DSP (or named as digital signal processing) is fine; general references, formulas, math and so on. On the other hand - maybe some split between audio and visual stuff would be good, because "visual" processing involves different type of approach and modules (like photo filtering plugins or video processing plugins).

User Examples... Maybe, just maybe - if it was moderated, and if posts were moved there, if they are examples of something - sure.

Trog suggested, and I agree with him, that separate subforum for ruby would be good.

I would merge Robotics, Home Automation and Machine Control, because in general it's the same.

These are just a few thoughts from me. I don't have yet the full picture either, but things as they are right now - are confusing to me, and as far I can see - for some others too.

[trogluddite]

Yes, I think there are some good points there.
I'm not so concerned with the way that the categories are arranged, but I agree that it would be useful to be able to keep this forum a little more organised than the SM one.
I'm not sure exactly what the best way forward is, but my main concern if that, if the forum grows to the size of the old SM one, it will suffer from the same problem - having loads of useful content, but much of it very difficult to find.
With the best will in the world, the search feature alone is not enough, because so much of the terminology we use is so ubiquitous, and applicable to so many contexts - it can be frustrating to have to read dozens of posts that only mention your search terms in passing, when you are in need of a definitive example.

But it would be a lot of work for admins/moderators to be filtering posts looking out for for things, making judgements on the value of particular posts, and moving everything around etc. And I think also, preferable that it is the users who decide which posts are of the most value.
Maybe a few simple tools added to the forum could help us to organise things better for ourselves. For example...
1) In "Advanced" search, the ability to filter for schematic attachments, "in-line" code boxes in the post etc.
2) Some kind of 'thumbs up' system so that posts can be recommended for 'stickying'.
3) Tags/Flags for threads - such as "Problem that need fixing", "Problem solved", "VST plugin download" - maybe editable only by the original poster and moderators.

Whatever improvement are made, maybe we all need to be a little more rigorous when we are posting - I am as bad as anyone for sending a thread off on a tangent, and then posting a schematic totally unrelated to the OP's question! And I doubt that anyone is likely to find my 'GraphicsPath Editor' when I put it in a thread called "Flowstone Art Club"!!
As an example, one of the other forums I use always has a big list of all the available plugins - sorted by name, or by author etc. But that is because the users take the time to put tags into their thread names, that then get used by the search engine that makes the index.

A good filing system is as much about the diligence of the people that use it, as it is about the system itself.