Support sections and Discord restructuring

[wermy]

Hey guys,
You may have seen the previous news post about trying to guide folks back to using the forums for support and asking questions, and using Discord for general chit-chat/banter (it's here if you'd like to read the reasoning behind all this). We've been trying to push this on the Discord server for a little over a month now, and honestly the results haven't been that great.

There has been frustration from some users (understandably, I think) when they are told to make a support thread on the forums for their issue/question, and a number of users ignoring us about it altogether (causing some understandable frustration for the mods, too). I've also noticed some regular users like Rodocop constantly getting tagged/mentioned to ask questions and get help as well, which is just rude in my opinion (a lot of people have Discord on their phone and if you get mentioned, your phone goes off). So, we're going to try a different approach.

It seems like a lot of the confusion/frustration stems from project-specific discord channels, so we're going to disable those to make it clear what the Discord server is supposed to be used for (meaning the mintyPi and GBZ channels are going away).

We'll also be tweaking the structure of the forums as well: each section (GBZ, mintyPi) will have one support section, and within those we'll have a "Resolved Issues" subsection. The plan is the main support sections will (hopefully) be unanswered questions only, and when a user has an issue resolved, they will mark their thread with a [RESOLVED] tag in the title so mods know to move it. We will also have a FAQ sticky in the mintyPi/GBZ sections which we will try to maintain. This will hopefully make it easier to browse open issues for users who want to try to help other users, while also making it very easy to search within the resolved issues sections to see if someone else has experienced (and fixed) the same problem you are having. It will take some time to go through and move resolved issues, so you'll likely see that happening over the next couple of weeks.

We are also going to create subsections in the buy/sell/trade support section for Kite and Helder to make it easier for them to offer support for their various boards/products they offer (we can add more for other sellers later if it makes sense).
If you have any questions/comments/concerns feel free to leave them below. Thanks!

[YaYa]

I really want to take my hat off for Rodocop for the amazing job he has done over discord helping people.
So many people have tagged him and he was always kindly replying everyone.
Thank you Rodocop !

[Chedda]

@rodocop is the hero that nobody asked for, he is the hero we deserve

[inches]

Another thing that might be helpful for anyone is to invite people to use PMs to move a conversation "offline" from the public thread.

For example, I asked if anybody knew anything about ball bearings for a project I was working on, but after getting into it with that person, I moved the conversation to a PM because it was irrelevant to the majority of people on that thread.

If anybody decides to help out on discord or get deep into something, or if you feel like you want to help out and it's not really publicly beneficial for others to hear about it, just start taking on PM instead maybe.

What do you guys think?

[Awesomenatious]

I really want to take my hat off for Rodocop for the amazing job he has done over discord helping people.
So many people have tagged him and he was always kindly replying everyone.
Thank you Rodocop !

Agreed..

[goodBEan]

All good

Always good to have troubleshooting in a form that can be archived and searched. This way repeat problems don't require a new thread.

[abrugsch]

All good

Always good to have troubleshooting in a form that can be archived and searched. This way repeat problems don't require a new thread.

A small tip from stackoverflow...
Leave duplicate threads intact (but possibly closed) with a link to the target thread it's a dupe of. The reasoning? The subsequent searcher may be looking for the particular search pattern that the dupe poster used in their OP. Quite often there are a couple of different sets of phrases used by people for the same things. This way they all route back to the original thread

[rodocop]

I was never offended by the tagging, but sometimes it did get a little much! I actually didn't really notice that other people even paid attention to it?! I never mind helping out when I can. As for the restructuring, we'll see how it goes, so far it seems good!