Not stickies, but...

[manaheim]

I was thinking about this the other day in the car... (yes, my every waking moment is spent thinking about TPF) :lmao:

We get a lot of repeat questions here, and we know this.

We also know that it's hard to make a "sticky" on some topics because so much of the responses to these kinds of things is made up of the opinions of the various members of the forums.

Ok, fair enough.

However, it seems to me very much that some kind of "Ok, new guy go read these things here before posting your question" would cover a lot of the repeat questions... "What is ISO?", "Why is my picture grainy?", "What kind of camera should I buy?", "Is this a scam?", etc.

So... my thought is what about hosted and heavily moderated discussions that remain as stickies of a sort?

For example, say you setup a heavily moderated forum area for recurring questions. A moderator posts a question for discussion such as "Whether or not to use RAW", and then everyone who wants to can weigh in. Any posts that are offensive or outright battling are kicked back to the poster/discarded/whatever.

This is optional, but you could then do something like leave the topic open for 14 days and lock it, with a potential re-opening of the topic for re-analysis in the future. You could also potentially leave the post open forever, but my thought was that you would have sort of an open-forum round-table type of thing and then close the discussion off, just as you would end a live discussion with people in attendance.

Perhaps a moderator could post an impartial summary at the top of the thread concluding the conversation, even. (just another option)

This way, you retain the discourse and the knowledge base of information as contributed to by the readers here, but it cuts down on people getting really irritated at having to answer the raw vs jpg thread over and over again, which would cut down a bit of frustration and allow people who are here regularly to focus more quality time on topics that are less recurring.

This would also give people a bit of a primer available to folks if they don't notice and post a question asking for something we have already discussed... you could very easily say "Oh the 'What is depth of field' question. See this link first and if you're still confused, come chat with us and we'll talk some more about it."

etc.

The logistics could all vary, but hopefully you see the general idea.

 

[Big Mike]

All that 'heavy moderating' sounds like a lot of work. :er:

And besides...it doesn't matter what we do...newbies will still skip right by it and post their questions anyway.

Really, I think the key is teaching people to use the search feature. I seem to remember that another forum (posting board) even had a message that was shown to the poster, every time they made a post...basically telling them to use the search feature before asking their question. And that board still had all the same questions asked day after day.

I don't know if we still have the articles section around here....but that was kind of a solution to this issue. People wrote up articles on the most asked questions, that were edited and posted for people to read. Doesn't really help much.

 

[manaheim]

What if we instituted a series of painful shocks?

I guess I can see what you're saying... but then being able to link to a specific thread to address the topic rather than tell them "use search, fool!" somehow seems more friendly. Not much different than what I do at work, actually... when we get a work request from someone and it isn't something we handle, rather than saying "not our issue" and closing the call, we make a point to give the work request to the right person. It's a tiny bit of extra work, but it makes a big difference.

Right now, we can't really do that.

I've seen the articles thing, but it seems like that hasn't taken off... I was kind of under the impression that it was very formal and structured and so I think people shy away from trying to get involved with it. Maybe that's just my perception?

I think the more moderated post structure would be more attainable without being so attainable as to encourage people to just openly bash one another. I also don't think the moderation of it would be THAT bad... I'd even volunteer personally to moderate it if you feel it's more than the existing mods could take on. I'm sure others would volunteer as well.

 

[Overread]

I can't remember where but Mike's comment reminded me of a website which had a code running (mostly in the newby areas where people post repetative questions) which would run a search on the key words used in the title of a new thread and then post back a list of results (I think it was about 4/5 with an option to view more) for the poster to consider before their post was posted.
A code like that could help things a lot around the site - forcing people to take note of possible other threads.

Articles is not dead - its just not running at lightspeed but its not dead