Thread

In my arduous uphill effort to learn EE, I have found most of the “help” in the forums lack the detail necessary to prevent noobs like myself from asking similar follow-up questions.

I have spent many dozens of hours reading through the KB, forums, and external resources in order make what little progress I have made in understanding the Swahili of EE.  I’d be happy to reduce my “noob” status to “sub-noob”, but that isn’t an option.

The result is that my questions don’t get answered, because, I assume the brain trust here concludes I haven’t read the manual, searched the forums, or been able to extract the genius residing in my inner programmer.

All this is to say, that not everyone here is as capable as the next person and some of us are slower to catch on than others.  It doesn’t mean we don’t read.  It just means that our aptitudes don’t include strange characters { }.  Please don’t blow us off by saying “this has already been covered”, “did you read the manual”, or “have you checked the KB?”.

I have also found that those individuals who finally “get it” after a lengthy back-and-forth with a “helper” don’t actually describe their success.  But, instead, respond with “I got it working, thanks!” and sign off without ever explaining how their problem was solved.

Whether or not a topic has already been covered does not mean it was explained well enough for everyone to understand.

My suggestion to improve the forums is simple ... If you are spending the time trolling the forums for people to help, then do us noobs all a favor and take the time to thoroughly explain the “how” and “why” something works or doesn’t work.  Simply pointing us to an article that has “already covered” a topic doesn’t help because nine time out of ten we have already read it and found it lacking in some way.  Suggesting a tag to try without explanation is pointless if we don’t understand what the heck it is supposed to do. 

For example, “may I suggest looking up {comment_url_title_auto_path}” doesn’t tell me how it is implemented, where it is used, what is used for, or how it relates to anything - I have already looked it up in the KB and read the one sentence useless description - now I am being told to go back and reread something that caused me to ask about it in the first place.

Details are everyone’s friends.  The EE manual isn’t so much an instruction manual as it is a list of tags, variables, code, and whatnot with little explanation of how these “things” fit together in the bigger puzzle ... read Boyink or Jamboree to understand how to “explain EE to a noob”.

I do greatly appreciate the few people who have taken the time to respond to my poorly worded inquiries and I am making progress learning EE.  But, everything can be improved, including the forums.

I think you just have to keep asking questions.  I have answered many posts on this forum and because I have no idea how well you understand EE compared to someone else then I am going to start out with a simple “pointer” answer in many cases.  Often my simple “pointer” is all someone needs.  If the pointer doesn’t work then I expect the person to come back and ask for more details.

Newcomers often come to the forums asking for the big picture view of how EE works and I point them to the docs you have mentioned simply because I feel that I could not do a better job of explaining.  Why write out a tutorial when they already exist and my own version would likely be worse unless I took the time to write out a multi-part series like Boyink did?

I feel the best way to use the forum is to ask more simple questions to attack specific problems rather than asking for a broad overview of how the system works.  Also, some of the “how to” questions in the “how to” forum are very complex.  If you don’t get your question answered then you might be asking about something that is really tough to answer.  These types of questions may or may not get an answer in the community sections.

Also keep in mind that there are both pro and community support forums.  These forums are also identified as such so you know which are pro.  The pro forums will guarantee a response in a certain amount of time (though not guarantee a “fix” especially if the problem is not supported.)

If you haven’t already, I’d set up a fast search in your browser to allow you to search the user guide from your address bar or search bar.  Nine times out of ten, that’s where you want to begin to learn about something, for instance, the {comment_url_title_auto_path} variable.  Then if it’s not clear, search for the same thing in the forums.  The forum search will point you to searches for the wiki and KB if you don’t find anything in the forums.  Then if it still doesn’t make sense, by all means, post!  A simple post titled “How do I use {comment_url_title_auto_path}?” is easy for long time users to answer, and unlike responding to a “big picture” post, they won’t feel like they’re on the hook to help you build your entire site.

I don’t think, however, that your issue has been that you are posting “big picture” posts and scaring people off.  I think it’s just a matter of numbers.  With only 14 posts (only 6 topics), my gut feeling is that you haven’t really given the forums an honest opportunity to bear itself out in your favor.  That said, your position as a new user is a unique one, since people do not stay new users for extended lengths of time, so I appreciate your feedback on what your experience has been thus far.  It’s a valuable perspective that obviously we cannot ourselves view things from.

By the way, I see you did have one question unanswered so I posted something there.  😉

I also maintain EEHowTo which I use as a brain dump for things I want to remember or items I see asked frequently on the forums.

I think in the end the issues you’re describing are ones that would be really difficult to ‘fix’ as they are more human nature than anything else. A lot of people come to the forums only when they have a problem and when that problem is gone they go away again - like you said many times not even posting what they did to come to a solution.

I personally have a bad memory, and many times people will follow up on a thread from a while ago and I honestly can’t even remember what I did for a solution - it might have been something else entirely if I couldn’t get my problem worked out in time and the clock keeps on ticking towards that deadline.

That said, considering the types and volume of response I’ve seen in other support forums, I think the forums here are pretty amazing (I recently went to the TinyMCE forums and there are pages of questions with almost no responses at all).  I personally ask quite a few questions, nearly all of which get an answer, and some of those (but not all) get resolved (if it was a question about a problem). I know I ask a lot of questions so I go through the forums rather regularly looking for questions that have 0 responses and try to help those first if I know an answer. There are also certain areas I think I’m more helpful with - things like PHP or SQL questions I’ll usually try to answer. In the end though it takes quite a lot of time helping out on the forums, and every minute of time I’m spending here is time I actually should be spending billing out on my current projects. I do it though, because the time invested comes back in the form of help and time saved down the road. 

I’m not meaning to come across as saying you’re wrong in any way - there’s always ways to improve things. I just don’t know of any real way to ‘improve’ the forums without simply hiring more people to post on the forums, which in the end probably isn’t the best use of their resources (money). The majority of people answering here are simply doing so because they love the product and know how important a supportive, responsive community is, not because they get something tangible in return (other than help for their own questions - although many posters seem to only answer questions and not post any which is amazing). I imagine the best thing to do is keep posting - usually the more specific your question the more easily it can be answered. Broad questions can be nearly impossible to answer.

I rambled a bit there - but I think I kind of said what I intended.

I’m pretty much in the same situation than you, paulb16 and often feel lost. There is something like information overflow for a beginner in a complex environment,- and EE is of that kind of software.  I think this cannot be avoided until I get “the big picture” and I will not get it until I’ve made my way through the gory details.

Unlike you I don’t think this is a problem of lack of documentation or willingness to answer questions detailed enough: Everything is there, most questions are answered or will be answered but how to ask the right questions and search for the right words (Yesterday I’ve searched 1 hour for “section_1” instead of “segment_1”, -stupid me!). That’s a vicious circle, the usual bootstrap problem.

I think one reason for my difficulties is that I need to understand the inner working off EE. It seems that in the anglo-american world people are used to learn by example, I’m not. My questions are not “How To” but “How does it work”. I think I’ve to dig into PHP or extentions respectively to get it.

Anyway, EE seems definitely worth the effort to master the initial, quite steep learning curve…

Don’t mean this the wrong way - but there really is no brain trust, but rather an infinite number of possibilities and a finite number of posts and articles. I am at the same time a complete newbie and yet there are small areas of EE which I have probably delved into as deep as anyone. I have had a couple of important questions do unanswered in recent months….because I think no one really knew the answer (well, others could have figured it out, but they have better things to do)......

So like any free service, I take what I can get…..but now that I know a “little”, I also try to help someone else once in a while. Hopefully, sooner or later there will more examples, more posts, more experts and more wiki articles.

I actually wrote my first real wiki entry recently on how I got separate banner ads to show up in different forum rooms, and I edited it a few times in the hopes that it did explain in the way that most folks would be able to understand.
http://expressionengine.com/wiki/Ad_banners_in_discussion_module/

That said, unless someone understands how to edit templates and the particular stuff being discussed, it is probably complete goop!

I also maintain EEHowTo which I use as a brain dump for things I want to remember or items I see asked frequently on the forums.

When are you setting up RSS?

@paulb16 & other ‘newbs’:
Fellow member, Michael Boyink, has a 16+ multi-part series on using EE here: http://www.boyink.com/splaat/weblog/category/building-an-expressionengine-site/

I myself have just finished part 16 today.
I suggest you tackle that tutorial, it just may explain tons to you, just as it did for me.
😊

When are you setting up RSS?

It’s been setup for years. 😊

But I didn’t have autodiscovery turned on.

Did that just now.

Link

My two cents - and just to set perspective, the EE forums generously rate me as “Member” - forget it. I am a noob.

Now, when I was a noo noob, I felt much the same as paulb16 - not enough big picture and too many confusing details. While curly brackets seemed familiar, when and when not to use quotes drove me mad, as did the seemingly arcane rules of double versus single quotes (the latter admittedly nothing to do with EE.) And all those tags seemed unnecessary when all I could dream of doing was a few linked pages driven by ata based content.

Now that I have graduated to noob, I have come to accept (and I hesitate to say this) that not even the developers of EE can explain the ENTIRE big picture of EE. From a perspective of it’s architecture, maybe. But from the perspective of how it can be applied, no chance. It is simply too complex and versatile.

Even I am now doing things with EE that would have scared me witless (did I spell that right?) when I started out.

So I agree with those who have suggested that some combination of the documentation and the forum is required, glued together with lots of questions. I have not analyzed my posts, but I would bet that questions outweigh helpful contributions by ten to one.

I agree that the present method requiring having to search the forums and read through sometimes pages of discussion before arriving at the actual solutions (or not arriving at them!) is tedious.

I would propose that anyone finally arriving at a conclusive “how-to” solution generate a Wiki page, and then create a placeholder, explicitly titled post to the forum pointing to that Wiki entry, titled so as to be helpful to the search engine and to people scanning the search results. I’ve done this with my Gallery Relationships wiki entry, which grew from a discussion in a forum post.

Perhaps including the word “Wiki entry” in the forum post title would be a good idea, as well as a reference link to the original forum thread that generated the solution?

I’m trying both. Any more suggestions?

Terry