Just the FAQ's, Ma'am

BuzzLY · 2002-12-09T05:18:54+00:00

What do you guys think about putting together a FAQ for the board. If you are a newbie, would you read it? If you are a veteran, would you appreciate havin...

Just the FAQ's, Ma'am

theDog

Originally posted by ahundiak
Think about it. The ones that are willing to do some research before posting probably already do so and hence don't post.

Ya know, if you're going to substitute contempt for patient counsel, you might as well replace the whole Newbie forum with big block letters that say "RTFM."

Just because someone has read TFM doesn't mean he understood TFM. In the case of PHP, i sometimes find TFM inscrutable, and i need someone to speak to me in English. Also to mention, as noted above, sometimes TFM is wrong. This can be either challenging, or hopelessly frustrating, depending on the individual. And TFMs are often very lacking in procedural advice.

I have a whole stack of FMs next to me here, and a hundred bookmarks of FMs in my browser. It's not always helpful, and so i go looking for friendly people to help.

This whole forum reads like a FAQ to me. The most common stupid newbie questions are by definition the most common newbie mistakes and misconceptions. I like to avoid contempt, so i'm busy reading practically the whole forum. It would be nice if the FAQs were organized into a FAQ. In fact, given how helpful this place and it's people have been to me, i'd be willing to help organize them.

</$.02>

Bunkermaster

concidering the ammount of Qs we have on :

how do i can send an email (english bad sorie)?
what is a database?
how do I use session?
what is the speed of an unladden swallow?
Can buzzly really fly?
etc.

we should have a basic answer to frequently asked questions (we CAN see frequently posted topics).

post a link to FAQ as first answer and maybe make it evolv over time to match new needs. Wouldn't be too much work if we all contribute.

BuzzLY

Well, I'm all for it myself. Maybe we can start by posting some of the more common questions/answers here, then once we have a few, we can create the FAQ. Of course, it will be a work in progress. All good FAQ's are.

I'll answer the first question:

No, I don't fly. I fall with style! 🙂

xblue

From my point of view, it may not prevent new users from asking the same questions over and over again, but a well organized FAQ can be a good thing to refer to for the one who answers the question.

And once they are there for the first time, and found out their question actually is answered in the FAQ, users might be encouraged to give the FAQ a look before posting - after all this should be faster than waiting for someone to answer.

BuzzLY

An excellent point. Plus, if we ask real nice, maybe we can get the admins to put a link to the FAQ thread on the forum home page... 😉

Bunkermaster

cough
/me tries to attract moderators and admins' attention

Weedpacket

Originally posted by theDog

Just because someone has read TFM doesn't mean he understood TFM. In the case of PHP, i sometimes find TFM inscrutable, and i need someone to speak to me in English. Also to mention, as noted above, sometimes TFM is wrong. This can be either challenging, or hopelessly frustrating, depending on the individual. And TFMs are often very lacking in procedural advice.

Which wouldn't be so bad if there was some indication that said Newbie had RTFM. I mean, right now I can say "I looked in the manual but I just didn't understand it". I just did. Doesn't mean it's true and I'm not just trying for the sympathy vote (I am a cynical old codger, aren't I?).

Now, if after describing their problem, they said
I looked in the manual at preg_match_all, and under PREG_OFFSET_CAPTURE, it said

If this flag is set, for every occuring match the appendant string offset will also be returned. Note that this changes the return value in an array where every element is an array consisting of the matched string at offset 0 and it's string offset into subject at offset 1.

And I didn't understand a word of it. (Incidentally, this is a True Story), I'd be more inclined to help. This is a person who shows that they actually have some problem-solving capability, and that if I were to help I won't be dragged into a spiral of ever-simplistic explanations, and desires to (a) suggest that they just don't have the conceptual toolkit needed to do any programming and that they'd be better off just asking or paying someone else to do the work for them, and/or (b) reach for my lart.

PS. What does that quote mean? I'd find out for myself, but I don't have a copy of PHP4.3 handy to experiment with.

Bunkermaster

something about a Quake capture the flag game during a offspring performance or something... I think

Next time try the ENGLISH manual 😉

[EDIT]
\o/ 600!!! <(^{^)>} (>^{^)>} <(^{^)>} <(^{^<)} <(^{^)>}

Woohoo!!!!

do I get a present or something?
[/EDIT]

packland

After a short tumultuous 8 week love affair with php.

A faq page would be ok but can it include a faq for all the pitfalls on configuring and tuning php/apache and mysql on a recent linux distribution -rh8 (2 weeks) and for all the possible nuances caused by server settings. (I also fell into the register globals trap with SAMS Teach yourself PHP4 as mentioned below)

All-in-all the concepts for server side scripting, apache configuration and mysql are pretty hairy apart from php itself. I think that although you get the same problems over and over, the site means that someone without a clue can ask for information from their point of reference --- this is very important (ie. the answers may be the same but the questions are different.) Even worse i usually end up here when i don't know what the question is.

I think ahundiak and xblue are on the right track. a faq might be useful to the people answering the questions.

Weedpacket

If the FAQ could be a forum, then each question can develop its own thread. There are up-sides and down-sides to this, of course.

The biggest up-side I can think of is that it allows a full discussion of the question to be developed following on from the "canonical" answer, which would be episodically updated to keep it current. Knowing why a given answer is the right one is often of inestimable benefit, but having to go through who knows how much discussion to winkle out the actual answer would almost certainly prove offputting for many of the exact sort of people the FAQ is intended to benefit.

Another advantage of the "one question one thread" architecture is that it would make it easy to RTFAQ the relevant answer when inevitably someone does ask it.

The downside is that it could become diluted with people just using it as a forum to ask their own questions; discussion might also degrade the benefit of having the discussion. In short, a FAQ would lose its worth if its signal/noise ratio dropped too low.

I hope I don't sound like some sort of neofascist/Orwellian (now there's a contradiction in terms) bookburning ultraconservative meritocratic chauvanist there. I'm just suggesting that the relevant moderator(s) would need to wield somewhat more editorial control than on the other forums - possibly to the extent of only allowing posts from some sort of "editorial board" (which may be contiguous with the moderators).

Weedpacket

Oh, and I like the options given in the vote. They remind me of some meetings I used to chair - "All those in favour, raise a limb .... all those against ... all those abstaining ... all those too apathetic to vote at all..."

Bunkermaster

/me raises a limb

I vote for WeedPacket's solution

Elizabeth

Perhaps instead of FAQ, it could be called "PHP Troubleshooting" or something to that effect. I don't know that people posting on here think that their question is frequently asked, as most likely they think it's specific to their own situation. And if they haven't taken the time to do a search, then perhaps they won't take the time to scroll through a FAQ thread either.

So perhaps if a "PHP Troubleshooter" was posted (more along the lines of an article) which outlined some common mistakes or things to watch out for for specific subjects (e.g. cookies)... even a laundry list such as "have you checked XXXX?" and "have you checked XXX?" it might filter out some of the newbies or common questions.

My $.02 🙂

-Elizabeth

run2web

Originally posted by BuzzLY
Come to think of it... that would be a fun addition to this board. Someone posts code that would normally work on a server with set conditions (such as register_globals turned off). However, the code has one or two errors in it, and it's up to everyone else to determine what the error is. It could be a fun game, and educational as well. Anyone interested in such a thing?

I think that is a great idea! The only thing I can think of that could be a drawback is different coding styles. But then again that could also be helpful in understanding how some of our minds actually work! 😉

feldon23

The rule to a useful Frequently Asked Questions (which is broken so often) is that:

#1 the questions should REALLY be the most-frequently asked. Anything that can go under a "More Info about the moderators here" or "More Info about this website" can go elsewhere. Stick with the top 10-15 subjects.

#2 the questions must be phrased in a way that someone who is looking for answers will recognize the question. It does not accomplish anything for the question to have jargon such that you have to already understand the topic!

#3 the questions should be focused on solutions, not just explaining a topic.

Not bad:
Q: My web host upgraded to a new version of PHP and now my scripts don't work. Help!
A: PHP 4.2 has turned off register_globals, so to use your script, change any references to passed variables from $submit to $_POST['submit'].

Better:
Q: My web host upgraded to a new version of PHP and now my scripts don't work. Help!

A: In the interests of security, PHP 4.2 has turned off register_globals by default. The vulnerability here is that someone could add ?variable=dosomething to the end of your script in their web browser and possibly make your script do unpredictable things.

This change will affect any script that uses globals such as $submit instead of the more proper $_POST['submit'] or, if you are maintaining compatibility with PHP 3, HTTP_POST_VARS['submit'].

You do not need to completely rewrite your script to get around this problem. If you wish, you can define local variables near the top of your script like:
$submit = $HTTP_POST_VARS['submit'];

As a temporary measure, you could also try (link to article about using .htaccess to do this)turning register_locals back on yourself(/link).

Note that it is good programming practice to use the $_POST or $HTTP_POST_VARS style anyway.

For more information on this, please refer to (url to a forum topic)this topic about this problem(/url).

xblue

I may be the only one, but I don't like the idea of gathering faqs in threads too much. I don't know, I imagine this somewhat, well, sort of crowded, and maybe too much to read very soon.

What really surprised me when I first looked at them were the faqs that hide behind the f.a.q. button. I expected these do deal with common php problems, maybe organized in different sections (which I like, because I think it allows for more than 15 q&a's).

and then, forum specific questions only, and not even covering a lot of the guidelines buzzly put together - wouldn't this actually be a good place?

feldon23

It is pretty strange that the FAQ button is used for vBulletin. Fortunately, this is changeable. On my board, I've been tempted to rename it "Help" and separately put a "FAQ" button which covers my topic.

Here are a couple of FAQs I have written (using my own version of MAKEFAQ):
http://www.feldoncentral.com/miniDV/FAQ.HTM
http://www.feldoncentral.com/Sachs/FAQ.HTM