General > General Technical Chat
Designated "Expert" Forum Users?
Nominal Animal:
--- Quote from: Cerebus on February 18, 2022, 07:03:27 pm ---
--- Quote from: Nominal Animal on February 18, 2022, 06:11:24 pm ---Downvotes remind me of an occurrence when I was a young whippersnapper doing IT support at a University Dept. a quarter of a century ago.
One of the teachers had noticed a problem on one of the computers in a classroom (PPC Macs). Instead of letting me know, they decided that a post-it note on the classroom door would suffice. It read: "Nominal Animal, one of the computers has a problem. Please fix."
--- End quote ---
So, what Post-It note did you leave under it for Prof. Dunderheid? >:D
--- End quote ---
I was so weirded out, none. Fortunately, I'm so easy to read in person, that when I explained what I had done, I do believe they understood that for me to be effective and make their work easier at all, they should spend at least minimal effort in describing the exact problem, and at least stick it on my door instead of some other arbitrary door in the building.
The head of the department hated me, and refused my request for a modest budget for replacement keyboards and mice, and instead demanded I go to her directly for every single purchase first. That lead to staff getting fed up with my long replacement times, and when their keyboard or mice had issues, started to just swap them with ones in the classroom, because after all, they were only for students, and they were Paid Staff... But I was to blame, of course, for the several day delays and non-working equipment in the classroom.
That sort of treatment for a couple of years leaves its scars even on the strongest of egos, I believe. At least I had a perfect model of what kind of boss never to be or become myself..
But, please, do note how these personal experiences are analogous to technical discussions on the net, and what to avoid here on EEVBlog. I'm very serious with the Agree proposal, and that having the numerical statistics (Thanks: counter, and discussed Up/Down voting counters) visible on all posts is definitely detrimental to the forum.
(Addendum: I actually implemented online course feedback forms in 1998, with the results in a CSV format that opened in e.g. Excel fine with defaults for easy processing. Most of the lecturers objected to its use, and instead demanded the use of paper forms, because they didn't want to have to learn to use Excel. Yes, several of the lecturers/teachers did have PhDs, and most had at least Masters. I used PHP for the forms and local flat file storage on a server I maintained myself, and the forms worked fine across Windows/Linux/Macs, as I implemented automagic form charset detection for MacRoman/ISO 8859-1/15/Win cp1252 AKA Western European. I did that for free while working as the IT support person for the entire dept, and all I got for that was nasty looks and snide remarks and objections from the staff, no attaboy's even... Teaches me right, eh?)
Bud:
"Agree" does not cut it either. If i ask a question and someone answers it or gives a solution to the problem, what is I will be Agreeing to? Using "Agree" would not make sense . I would want to Thank the person, not Agree.
MK14:
--- Quote from: Bud on February 18, 2022, 09:31:04 pm ---"Agree" does not cut it either. If i ask a question and someone answers it or gives a solution to the problem, what is I will be Agreeing to? Using "Agree" would not make sense . I would want to Thank the person, not Agree.
--- End quote ---
I think the idea is that we either have a COMBINED thank/agree button (i.e. just rename 'thank' to be 'Thanks/Agree'), or have two buttons, one for thanks and one for agreeing. Please see Nominal Animals posts for more accurate details.
Ed.Kloonk:
Life was better when we just posted +1
Nominal Animal:
--- Quote from: Bud on February 18, 2022, 09:31:04 pm ---"Agree" does not cut it either. If i ask a question and someone answers it or gives a solution to the problem, what is I will be Agreeing to? Using "Agree" would not make sense . I would want to Thank the person, not Agree.
--- End quote ---
True, but consider this if Thank/Agree was combined into a single button:
If you are the asker, then clicking it on an answer obviously emphasizes the Thanks aspect.
If you are neither the asker nor the answerer, clicking on the answer emphasizes the Agree aspect.
The two are orthogonal. The count (number of thanks/agrees) on any specific question does not matter, but it matters what those who have thanked/agreed have recently posted. If it is the asker, then it is some variant of "Thanks, I believe this is useful". If it is someone else, then it is some variant from "Agreed, this is what I too would have suggested" to "Hey thanks, I think this will be useful for me too". To find out the value of such a click on a particular post, you check the recent posts of those who have clicked it for that particular post, to see what kind of stuff they normally post, and how much value that gratitude/agreement has in the context of that particular post.
Having Agree and Thanks separate, but otherwise functionally the same (and getting rid of the Thanked: counter in ones posts), would be even better, but not technically available right now as far as I know.
For example, if I went to the TEA thread, and started Thanking/Agreeing with posts, anyone checking out my posting history can see that I don't actually have any "proper" test equipment; even my "oscilloscopes" are a DSO138 kit (1 Msps, 200 kHz bandwidth, ±50 Vpp) and an Analog Discovery 2 (100 Msps, 10 MHz, ±25 Vpp). Numerically, the weight of my Thanks/Agreed there is basically zero.
Now, on the C programming forum, there the situation is completely different, and the weight of my opinion to you is easy to assess from my past posts and associated discussion threads.
In every situation I can think of, the difference between Thanks and Agreed is either obvious, or irrelevant.
--- Quote from: Ed.Kloonk on February 18, 2022, 09:42:02 pm ---Life was better when we just posted +1
--- End quote ---
Exactly! The total number of such posts (in response to some post or question) is irrelevant; but the fact that a specific member chose to do so, is informative. The relevance and applicability of that information is not trivially visible in the member profile, and one has to read their recent/relevant posts if unfamiliar with their output, but that is the nature of information exchange: each statement and claim must be examined in the relevant context. No shortcuts.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version