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.
-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.
>>Why on earth, do we not have enough posts 'written' in Stupid Monkey *** already?
Maybe we could add an auto translate Stupid Monkey *** Translator.
Instead of detecting tabs, or C code, it would convert
"HI AFAIK I tryed testing my bored 4ever, it broke. Wut now? l8r"
to: "Hello I type very poorly like I got hit on the head with a heavy object. I am having issues with an evaluation board. Any suggestions?"
Do take David's suggestion and go to stackoverflow.com, get a feel of how it works. Click on the advertisements there.
you do that
asking for a lot (not just the above) in a forum that is provided for free is not reasonable.
The forum as it is works. Yes, it could use some improvements, but keep the fact that you do not pay for it in sight. I do not know what is involved with the various suggestions above, but what i suggest to David is that he does the following: FIRST require registration, then SECOND set up a voting (3 votes per registered user) on the list of suggested improvements that are within an acceptable effort to implement.
finally one suggestion:
A few strangely named creatures hide behind their monniker and spew bile on a regular basis. require registration and the real name used.
"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.