All,
I have noticed a few posts that have made some suggestions about forum enhancements.
As we're migrating and enhancing the site, there may be an opportunity to enhance the forum, as well. Some of the suggestions I have seen are:
If you have any opinions on these or other enhancements/modifications, please post here or email me directly at david.lively@arm.com.
-Will you allow:
-Voting up and down the usefulness of an answer? -Click on a user name to see all his activity? -Badges for good answers / good questions? -Patchwork quilt avatars? -Mark a question as answered or unanswered?
Also a mobile-friendly view for the forum would be nice
"Also a mobile-friendly view for the forum would be nice"
The current forum isn't even PC-friendly in case someone posts "code" with a 500-character line.
There should be a hard maximum width to code blocks with a scrollbar in case someone do post long source lines. Never, ever, should the "normal" text comments be stretched in width.
If making the above change, it wouldn't hurt with a "copy" or "save" button beside the code segment. But that is a minor feature request. Not letting long source code lines break the formatting is a major feature request.
-Voting up and down the usefulness of an answer? -Badges for good answers / good questions? tried in other fora and turned into a 'pissing contest'
-Click on a user name to see all his activity? good idea
-Patchwork quilt avatars? what is that?
-Mark a question as answered or unanswered? I do not see how
Also a mobile-friendly view for the forum would be nice Why on earth, do we not have enough posts 'written' in Stupid Monkey Shit already?
There should be a hard maximum width to code blocks Yes, YES, yes
Erik
Good "karma" or whatever it is called often work out well.
It's the negative votes that tends to result in big fights. Especially since it quickly becomes obvious that some people use them in a fight, i.e. A and B have an argument, and B uses negative votes on A:s comments. Only A and B online at the time with rights to vote, so very transparent.
In a forum where everyone may give any number of + votes (but of course only one + vote/post) you get a situation where most posts gets one or more +. So the difference between a good and a bad answer is zero or one votes contra 10 or 40 votes. But you don't get any "revenge" involved in the voting - best revenge anyone can do is to avoid to vote. But their missing vote will not make much of a difference.
The thing with votes is that they should help a reader without creating badwill from intentional punishments. http://www.8052.com sometimes (has been some time since last I saw it now) suffers from voting as personal agendas. But it has happened that posts have received "Answer is wrong" just because someone don't like a perfectly correct answer. But problems with negative votes are common everywhere.
"It's the negative votes that tends to result in big fights"
True.
But it'd be really useful to come up with some kind of "non-judgemental" way of flagging posts without having to repeatedly re-post the same basic information; eg:
* There is insufficient information in this post to permit an answer;
* This question is answered in existing documentation (Manual/Datasheet/etc)
* This is a 3rd-party question - please contact the 3rd party (eg, chipmaker)
* Please don't try to cheat on your homework by posting it on this forum
* This post is factually incorrect.
etc, etc,...
Preferably, "flagging" the post should result in a detailed explanation being sent to the poster's registered email address.
In the case of "factually incorrect", the person setting the "flag" should be required to state why.
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