How to help the right way as a new user or not experienced user
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I've learned my lesson the hard way, let's see if the rest of you can learn it easier
If you are new and not experienced with Vanilla, help with the little things until you are experienced with Vanilla. Things like Welcoming others to the community, asking for the version of Vanilla if not mentioned in discussion, or helping with what you can or the little things will both ensure that users don't get confused and you are not providing incorrect information. Do this until you are experienced with Vanilla, and then you can help out with code and other advanced stuff. New users will sometimes pass around wrong information, and in a community with over 40,000 users, it's gonna get mixed up really well, so we need new users to help with the little stuff as needed until they become experienced with Vanilla.
Comments
Was gonna post in tutorials, but not allowed
@ilovetech
Totally agree.
I think it would be great if those who got help with their issue(s) then stuck around to offer help to others, but as you say, stick to what you are confident with.
There are lots of things that come up regularly, and it would be excellent if we had 100, rather than one or two, people to offer advice re: these common things.
I think a lot of people are gonna agree on this:
Also false advises could be helpful if they are corrected. So I think it would be better not to offer a solution when you are new and unsure, but to speak out a guess. Experienced users could either point out why that guess was rubbish or just confirm that it was the right way to solve that special problem.
To my opinion the most important thing is a vivid community. If you only have experts in the forum of your software, but there are only a dozen of them, your forum is dead.
You couldn't have a supporting forum without experts either - as always, the right mixture will be the key to success: you need those guys who know everything about the software, those that are brave enough to put together what they know and what's just guessing and those people who do not know anything about the software and just by asking may inspire those gridlocked experts to think about completely new ways of solving a problem.
And that's why I think there shouldn't be a limit of knowledge you have to have gained before you should post a comment.
By the way:
1. saying hello is always nice, but if all 40k users would say hello to every new user, it would be hard to identify the answers. Nevertheless in every group every group member has a special role. You could be the welcome guy!
2. although it is a good advise to specify the version of your Vanilla installation when you ask a question, the version number is not always needed for giving an answer and sometimes the version number is not enough. So I think it would be best if those guys who suspect to know an answer put the right questions
And I wish I could be the Welcome guy, but I have no way to track registered users
At least you could welcome everyone new, who is writing something by monitoring that one: http://vanillaforums.org/badge/comment GO, GET THEM!
My comment was an additional opinion, just like your opening post.
I am being replaced all over the place
I agree that one welcome per thread is plenty. Also, stub content is great for the wiki, just start it with the sub template
{{{Stub}}}.Search first
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Indeed, I had thought about adding "... but you have to share that title with hgtonight"
Lol... that's my mistake ... I asked him to sit back, relax, learn and welcome users once in a while, asking for their versions.
Figured that's the best place to learn how to post instead of posting rubbish just to 'collect points and badges'
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