Forum-wide Search For Unanswered Threads

[sysfu]

In the spirit of giving back it would be handy if the FreeNAS forum vBulletin software could be hacked to support searches for unanswered threads.

Here's some more info about how to enable this feature: http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=201100

 

[Stephens]

A down side to that logic is just because a thread has a reply doesn't mean it has an answer. What if I say I have a problem with my UPS not working (it does now, under 8.2+) and someone else replies, "Me too, and I have a different UPS model"? Now we have two people you'll skip/ignore because there's a reply to the thread. I just do "new posts" each time I visit, right click on the little icon next to each resulting thread (which means go to the first unread post of that thread), then open it in a new tab. Then I use "Mark all posts as read". Then I go through all the tabs I opened, responding as appropriate.

If you do that each visit, it doesn't take that long.

 

[ProtoSD]

And some unanswered threads have been answered 50 freaking times elsewhere and the poster was just too lazy to search....

-1

 

[cyberjock]

And some unanswered threads have been answered 50 freaking times elsewhere and the poster was just too lazy to search....

-1

+1 with protosd. I've started not answering some questions that sometimes are answered on the first page of the same forum section they're posting in. Some people are really lazy! I'm sure I have a hater group for me because of how many "RTM" posts I've made to people. Despite the number of threads I can expect that every 3 days or so someone will ask a question that is answered with "You don't have enough RAM", "You'll have to experiment to find out if your UPS is supported", or "You can't just add a single drive to a RAIDZ2 vdev and have redundancy". I'm glad I'm not a forum moderator because sometimes I wonder if I would post "RTFM and/or use the forum search" and lock the thread.

I did notice one thing in another forum. I was totally impressed with it too. When someone signs up with the forum it had some checkboxes with the "I have read and agree to the forum rules" with something like "I have read the manual cover to cover" and asked a very simple question that you'd know if you read the manual and another question about the FAQ and a guide someone had for that forum. These were amazingly simple questions that you'd know the answer to if you had any clue at all.

When I saw that I was shocked at first. Then I thought that it was really smart and wondered if we could implement that in our forum. Even a simple question like "What is the hardware RAID version equivalent to RAIDZ2" or "How much RAM does the manual recommend for ZFS systems?" would work. Then we'd at least know they HAD to look at the manual and the FAQ. I'd feel a little less guilty with saying "RTFM" and watching them steam over the answer and that work was required.

I've had to start using the "ignore" feature of the forum. I have 1 person ignored as of about a week ago. I hate that I have to resort to deliberately avoiding some people. I don't remember his name but his posts made it sound like I deliberately didn't tell him something because I was deliberately trying to lead him astray. I can handle some pretty dumb people, but if you're going to deliberately accuse me of trying to lead you astray then you can be damned for what you are. It's funny that in real life I'm very forgiving of dumb people(you have to learn sometime, right?) but in a forum setting I get tired of the same questions every 3 days.

The one thread I hate but are accepting of are those where people have had a drive fail and they are questioning the replace process. I know if I have a drive fail I'll be a little paniced too. People that haven't actually done a drive replacement as part of their testing phase of preparing to use FreeNAS will obviously question the manual's thoroughness and accuracy. I'd be a little skeptical of how "good" the manual is at explaining when my zpool is degraded too. Perhaps I should put together a youtube video showing a drive replacement and resilvering.

Edit: Anyone know of a good program for video editing for Windows that's simple to learn for a youtube video? Also any recommendations for a program for recording a window or screen?

 

[cyberjock]

Another hilarious thing I've seen is one forum had a section called "wall of shame" and threads that pose questions that have been answered very regularly are moved to the "wall of shame" and left unanswered. I got a GREAT laugh out of looking at some of those threads. They were SO hilarious sometimes! They had 25 threads per page and the first page had something like 7 threads in less than 15 days that were the same question by different people that all potentially could have had the same answer.

 

[ProtoSD]

I did notice one thing in another forum. I was totally impressed with it too. When someone signs up with the forum it had some checkboxes with the "I have read and agree to the forum rules" with something like "I have read the manual cover to cover" and asked a very simple question that you'd know if you read the manual and another question about the FAQ and a guide someone had for that forum. These were amazingly simple questions that you'd know the answer to if you had any clue at all.

I've seen this also, I think it was on one of the hackintosh forums. It's been suggested here, but our glorious admins don't participate in the forums enough or something to care about implementing it. It's just causing knowledgeable people that were willing to help to abandon the forums because they're tired of repeating the same shit day after day.

 

[cyberjock]

I've seen this also, I think it was on one of the hackintosh forums. It's been suggested here, but our glorious admins don't participate in the forums enough or something to care about implementing it. It's just causing knowledgeable people that were willing to help to abandon the forums because they're tired of repeating the same shit day after day.

Admins- Reconsider adding this! I don't want to leave because I'm tired of the knuckleheads that don't want to RTM...

 

[bollar]

FWIW, I have read the manual and almost everything else I can find on FreeNAS and I'm surprised at the number of RTM messages here.

Some of the questions seem perfectly reasonable to me, even if they are documented somewhere in the manual or forum. New users have to digest a huge amount of information, don't know the keywords likely to generate a successful search and also don't know about other resources that might make a search successful. In my early days here, I've seen several questions that were told to RTM and I had to think where in the manual I would get that answer -- and once I did, would it make sense? I'm sure you know that's the case with striped Vdevs -- I had to read the manual, noobsauce80's guide and some other blogs before it made sense -- and then I still did it on a dev machine because I didn't believe what I read.

Maybe it's worse because FreeNAS is attractive to people who have previously run an appliance NAS and their user experience expectations are way off base. You really need to know a lot to successfully deploy a system.

I have modded on some huge forums and I hate questions that show the user hasn't RTM, too. But I also think the community will function better if more of a hand is given to these new users -- maybe it's a simple as "RTM at this link and check out page 17 -- come back and let us know if we can fill in the blanks."

Anyway, I know you guys are frustrated, but I hope you can look at it in a different way. The way you currently feel isn't healthy for you, or the community.

 

[cyberjock]

I understand the vdev issue. I had alot of questions about vdevs when I first started using FreeNAS. I had nobody to ask and I wasn't about to inundate the forum with a bunch of "explain this please' posts. After I got a grasp of what was going on I created the guide. I always try to answer questions that I know aren't 'easily' answered with the manual.

When you start deliberately doing exactly what the manual tells you NOT to do, then I tune out quickly and dismiss the OP. If he/she can't be bothered to read(or follow) the manual then I can't be bothered to answer. What's to say he won't ignore my post when I tell him he's messed up and the manual says to do X. Also, if the manual says you can't do things(good example is use the "unused" space on your USB) then why the F*($ should ANYONE be asking in the forum "how" to do it. If they ask "why", that's a totally different question. But the "why" has also been answered a bunch of times because every thread that starts with "How" then turns into "Why".

 

[ProtoSD]

I have modded on some huge forums and I hate questions that show the user hasn't RTM, too. But I also think the community will function better if more of a hand is given to these new users -- maybe it's a simple as "RTM at this link and check out page 17 -- come back and let us know if we can fill in the blanks."

If people gave me some indication that they actually tried to search by referencing something, or explaining what they tried, I was happy to get them pointed in the right direction, but when I see the same bloody questions day after day and it's obvious there wasn't any effort to do some research, then it is RTFM.

I felt like the replacement for searching, and after spending countless time creating the FAQ, writing HowTo's, creating sticky's, and posting in BIG text links to those things, and STILL having people disregard them is pretty insulting. Adding to that is admin's that are too busy to help the people that are trying to help them and can't implement features in the forums to help. A little bit of appreciation goes a long way.

 

[paleoN]

It's often painfully obvious people haven't read anything what so ever. It's much easier for them to wait and be spoon-fed the answer than to put forth the base effort and actually read. Which most of the people answering have already done themselves.

I've always found this an interesting read, How To Ask Questions The Smart Way. I believe it was originally geared towards technical mailing lists, but applies to forums as well. Of course these new users would never actually read it. iX seems to have this forum more "User" facing as well. Which is fine. Though it's too bad they leave it to the Mods & community and don't pick up the slack themselves.

It's just causing knowledgeable people that were willing to help to abandon the forums because they're tired of repeating the same shit day after day.

A more appropriate response would be to ignore the repeated questions and answer the ones that interest them though they still have to wade through the crap. Conversely, that leaves a lot for the Mods to answer, given iX's level of participation, and they are busy enough as it is.

 

[ProtoSD]

A more appropriate response would be to ignore the repeated questions

Hence the topic of this thread, Forum-wide Search For Unanswered Threads :D

Why would someone want to search for UNanswered questions when they can search for ones that HAVE answers but still don't do that???

and answer the ones that interest them though they still have to wade through the crap

And then we get to the bait-and-switch threads where it starts out with something tempting and snowballs into something else ;)

I think I've seen that How To Ask Questions The Smart Way somewhere before, maybe if it was made into a video *someone* might watch it and use it, but even if there was a post that said "no searching, all the answers are here", people still wouldn't read it.

 

[paleoN]

Hence the topic of this thread, Forum-wide Search For Unanswered Threads :D

Hah, true enough. I haven't noticed all that many unanswered threads. However, maybe I wrote them off as dumb questions and just ignored them thereafter.