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- Jan 20, 2008
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Recently I've been thinking about our FAQ section and how limited it is. A recent post reminded me how many new members are asking the same questions over and over and they are being told to search for their information. Fair enough, they really should be doing their own research, but we've never had a really good single point of beginner's information organized in a concise way that we can point them to.
I used to point them to Chad's FAQ, but it's out of date, poorly formatted, and a lot to digest for someone looking for the answer to a frequently asked simple question. We keep adding stickies, which do help, but they're disjointed, incomplete, infrequently updated, and often abandoned altogether.
In the old days, it used to be you'd point them to Sam's FAQ, but in those days, the only people interested in lasers were the kind of people who don't mind sorting through a poorly indexed and incredibly outdated tome of unedited usenet posts. A lot of the people who come to this site today don't have the attention span to read more than one page back before posting a new thread, so pointing them to a labyrinthine maze of outdated links just makes them continue to post stupid questions.
I propose we should add a wiki to the site where we could post FAQ's and guides, which would be constantly archived in one place, and community edited to prevent mistakes and to add relevant information as technology progresses.
What do you think?
I used to point them to Chad's FAQ, but it's out of date, poorly formatted, and a lot to digest for someone looking for the answer to a frequently asked simple question. We keep adding stickies, which do help, but they're disjointed, incomplete, infrequently updated, and often abandoned altogether.
In the old days, it used to be you'd point them to Sam's FAQ, but in those days, the only people interested in lasers were the kind of people who don't mind sorting through a poorly indexed and incredibly outdated tome of unedited usenet posts. A lot of the people who come to this site today don't have the attention span to read more than one page back before posting a new thread, so pointing them to a labyrinthine maze of outdated links just makes them continue to post stupid questions.
I propose we should add a wiki to the site where we could post FAQ's and guides, which would be constantly archived in one place, and community edited to prevent mistakes and to add relevant information as technology progresses.
What do you think?
anything that would help the helpless would be very good idea, and besides Jerry needs a break hehehe...
