new forum for the newbies?

Nice idea, but given the number of newbies who post newbie Max questions to the Dev list, despite advertisement that makes it pretty clear that's the wrong place... given that, well, one could give it a try anyway.

Don't really think the forum is big enough for that. Also, it's hard to decide who's a noob and who's not. According to the standard of some, there would only be about 100 non-newbies. I don't mind the way it is now, it's not like you're having to sift out decent threads, most of them are ok...Maybe a 'rate the level of this thread' button would be better?

All good points!
Understand, it is providing the beginner with a simple, reliable & clear source of info that is my driving motivation here: perhaps a little "good info for beginners" button is all we need.

Perhaps not...
I just wonder how many starting users would turn to the "DEV" forum if there was a clearly labeled "FAQ" or "Getting Started" Forum...?

again, I am not married to the idea, just wanted to have folk think about having such common knowledge marked as common and frequent, and therefore easy to locate.

ymmv
l&k
j2k

the number of "newbies" grew significant after the windows
version came out.

sooner or later i also had this idea about splitting up the
forums.
it is like you said, there are enough here who would read it
and help here and there, just for fun.

but the big problem with two forums is that intermediate
users will have to read both and never know which question
has to be asked where.

what we would need first in line is a place for FAQs.
poly voicing is discussed daily here, and about every two
weeks somebody starts to learn biquad or how to make nice
GUIs.
telling them to rtfm is not an option, and pointing to old
threads sucks because you have to search them yourself in
order to do so.

i like beginners questions a lot, i learn myself from answering
and helping more than you could think, it can sometimes make
you try out things you have not done yourself before.

Quote:
...telling them to rtfm is not an option, and pointing to old
threads sucks because you have to search them yourself in
order to do so.

Another tiresome source of wisdom that some persons will tell you is worth reading is "How to Ask Questions"

http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

In particular, I was reminded of this bit:

Quote:
There is an ancient and hallowed tradition: if you get a reply that reads "RTFM", the person who sent it thinks you should have Read The Fucking Manual. He or she is almost certainly right. Go read it.

RTFM has a younger relative. If you get a reply that reads "STFW", the person who sent it thinks you should have Searched The Fucking Web. He or she is almost certainly right. Go search it. (The milder version of this is when you are told "Google is your friend!")

In Web forums, you may also be told to search the forum archives. In fact, someone may even be so kind as to provide a pointer to the previous thread where this problem was solved. But do not rely on this consideration; do your archive-searching before asking.

Often, the person telling you to do a search has the manual or the web page with the information you need open, and is looking at it as he or she types. These replies mean that he thinks (a) the information you need is easy to find, and (b) you will learn more if you seek out the information than if you have it spoon-fed to you."

Of course, this certainly doesn't cover those situations where the matter in question is NOT answered - in fact, it's great to have a way to keep track of that information when it comes to updating and correcting the documents that you feel that people shouldn't be told to read.

Do feel free to answer the same questions over and over again as well as encouraging new users to not make use of the resources a fair number of us have spent time and effort on, and to ignore the large number of people besides yourself who've already spent *their* time answering the question the last time it came up. We all appreciate the vote of confidence.

Mr. Taylor,
you are correct. RTFM and "Search the forum archive " are almost always the best response to "overly basic" questions,

except:
I think that we are fated to have a steady stream of folk to whom such resources are opaque : after all, they did not use them before bothering the community at large, did they? The simpler the path to them, the more obvious the availability..well, you see my point.

My only desire is to make the existing deep fonts of wisdom
as transparent as possible to the "information-ally challenged" masses among us: primarily for the time honored internet value of forum "signal to noise ratio", a metric I am very sensitive to, having too often violated the mimetic space with insufficiently correlated signal.

whatever, i'm easy 'bout this, it's fine as is....

l&kj2k

PS GT yr voiceband jilt 'remix/recontext' album is lovely, on my personal high rotation playlist.

I'd say that I'm generally of the opinion that balancing the signal-to-noise is an important matter and that separating out a newbie-only list would pretty much mean that quite a number of regular readers wouldn't hang out there (it'll be interesting to see how traffic on the Max list changes when Max for Live appears, since there will be a Max-for-Live mailing list I expect to be overwhelmingly noobish on the Ableton site). It's certainly an arguable proposition, but I think that anything we can do to get new users accustomed to the resources already available to them is a general long-term good. When the time came to completely redo the Max tutorials, the list of commonly asked questions was sitting there on the table, and no small number of the common questions are - in fact - answered in the new tutorials. The same is going to be true for the redo of the MSP tutorials, which is ongoing. In a similar fashion, the vastly expanded examples that come with Max were also done with that list of common questions sitting nearby.

I know that there are some people who think that popping off a random question without bothering to see if an answer is already out there constitutes an assumption that the questioner's time is more important than the persons who are supposed to answer every random query. I don't think that one should ascribe to arrogance what can be explained by a simple lack of mindfulness. The question, for me, involves how to encourage some kind of mindfulness on the part of new users. Your mileage may vary from mine, of course.

One reason to answer a question with a reference rather than a patch isn't only to discourage the culture of the passive sequential patch grovel, but also to reinforce the notion that it's usually the case that there is an answer out there. There are simply very few new questions. In those cases where there the materials we provide simply doesn't have an answer, we try to provide it.

P.S. Thanks for your kind words about my work. There's quite a lot of work which is every bit as boring and quiet etc. available here: http://www.rtqe.net/downloads.html

gregory

My initial thought on this was: We have those two stickies up at the top of the list that explain about searching the archive, checking the manual, etc.

Perhaps immediately after registering and then logging in the first time, a newly registered forum goer is sent directly to a 'Welcome to the Forums' page, with a list of commonly asked questions (and the answers), and nudging people to exhaust all other avenues before querying the community.

if people reading this thread wish to offer content for a FAQ sticky, i'd be happy to add it with the others (assuming my superiors don't object).

my thought is a FAQ list with either links to forum posts, or simple inline patches as answers would be quite useful. could be left unlocked, so people could add to it, with the requirement that each reply be a FAQ and the answer (no un-answered questions).

i was planning to do the same for the jitter list at some point, but would not know where to begin with the max list.