Telling people to use "Google," to "RTFM," or "Use the search feature"

Dogs · 03-21-2010, 09:17 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by XavierP

Stickies are a great resource, but only useful if they are read. Trickykid has written 2 stickies - 1 on installing programs and 1 on choosing a distro. In both cases, they appear to be ignored. UnSpawn has a couple of marvellous stickies in the Security forum - again, I don't think anyone reads them before posting.

In another forum, posts which have been answered before or are covered by stickies are closed outright. Jeremy (and the rest of us) feel that would work against the friendliness of the site, but yes, it does get frustrating. There is no real answer - we've postulated adding an extra screen to the login, but that would add steps to the registration process which would hurt us. The "Has this question been asked before?" link in the post a thread page was another idea, but that seems to have limited use.

If anyone reading this has any ideas on ways to cut down on the repetition, without making LQ less friendly, please post your idea in the Website Questions & Suggestions forum (obviously after searching first to make sure no one else has had the idea

). While I can't say that your ideas will be put in place, I can say that they will be seen and considered.

What if you compared the title of the potential submission to all the other titles within a certain date range, if more than 85% similar, then compare the body of the document to the body of the compared document, and if it is more than 33% similar, merge it with the existing thread, otherwise create the new thread with existing title.

HasC · 03-21-2010, 10:31 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by linmix

There are many people who accept terms of conditions of services without actually reading either the terms or the FAQ or anything else that might give them a clue as to how things work or should work.

Some time ago, I was using a little piece of P2P software called giFT (the Gnutella/FastTrack/others daemon and client, you know). Well, before you can use it, you should edit its config file, by hand. And it's arranged in a way you should read it from beginning to end, if you want to make the program run (on some parts of the config file, there are dummy vars you should set to 0 or 1, you should read carefully to find them). If you don't like to read, chances are you'll never use giFT.

My question is, can LQ implement something like that on registration time? So the new people are forced to read, and know how to behave

Dogs · 03-21-2010, 11:26 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by HasC

Some time ago, I was using a little piece of P2P software called giFT (the Gnutella/FastTrack/others daemon and client, you know). Well, before you can use it, you should edit its config file, by hand. And it's arranged in a way you should read it from beginning to end, if you want to make the program run (on some parts of the config file, there are dummy vars you should set to 0 or 1, you should read carefully to find them). If you don't like to read, chances are you'll never use giFT.

My question is, can LQ implement something like that on registration time? So the new people are forced to read, and know how to behave

As was stated earlier, if your registration process is long and complicated, you won't get as many people registered.

Furthermore, I can't count on the hands of one hundred people the amount of times I've heard someone complain about forced tutorials for products (especially games).