But I do see now that steering a completely civil, factual and well presented thread with direct personal attacks - "your post is crap" - is allowed without even getting any moderator comment on the matter. And that you can then go "boohoo, moderators", and you never have to justify what you say.
I'm a bit disappointed.
I've seen this trend a few times lately (which is why I snapped, and am sorry for it): it's clearly OK to just jump in to a random, civil, factual discussion out of nowhere, and expliticly dismiss the effort of the posters, using fairly strong words that clearly fall into your "abuse" category, for no apparent reason whatsoever, with no clear motive.
You are right that my response is not any better, and actually it is even worse. Still, it's very interesting to see the total lack of comment about the actual root cause of this issue, even when it's in plain sight. But you have set a clear line here. It's completely OK to go and dismiss people's comments and effort, using any words available with the "you are shit" message written all over, but if you reply back commenting about the poster themselves using the same words, it's not OK. Thanks - I admit I tested this line on purpose. I understand now where the line is. And I agree it's logical to draw it here: talking shit about people's effort, time, skills and comments is OK, while talking about the person directly isn't. Indirect "fuck you" - anything goes. Responsing back directly - not OK.
Still, I'm disappointed in you guys. I would either lower or rise the line; to either disallow this kind of shit completely, or let it be, and let the people fight. I.e., either forcing civil, noise-free environment, or creating the Wild West. Now you are failing to do either.
Luckily, the OP got the actual help from me 1 hour 4 minutes from their initial post, and from Seekonk just 1.5 hours later. Later replies give more insight (with a tad of civil debate) how to apply the tip in reply #2, which is an important pointer, because implementing a running cumulative average in a microcontroller is not trivial for a beginner (even more could be said about the precision and level of fixed-point math required, but I don't bother to do it right now). When combined, these replies include everything the OP needs to try out first, as the level of noise seen on the line is not indicative of any serious issue. Most likely, the problem will be solved with the combination of these two pieces of advice. But we need to hear back from the OP to see how it goes before we can help further.
I like to help people, and do it a lot on these forums, which I think no one will disagree with. But since no one pays for this "service", I have an ego such that I don't like my help being totally dismissed, without actual pointers to factual errors or important omissions I could fix. I guess I'm not the only one here who's like this.
BTW, I feel that the lack of the "ignore" function - present in most forums - puts a huge burden on the moderators. The ignore function is the most reliable way to improve S/N ratio, and everybody can do their own decisions. This prevents conflicts, and avoids a situation where the decision of not having the ignore function "forces" the people to be together, at the mercy of the moderators; in which case, most of the time, at least one of the parties will feel unhappy about the moderator decisions.
I mentioned the ignore function once on a post - I got several PM's from well known posters with good karma, who also were wondering the lack of this feature, and definitely wanted to have it. We wondered it together. Without giving us the basic tools to cope with trolls and shitposters, you better do a damn good job dealing with it "universally", and better be fair to everyone, including the contributors.
BTW, being one of the victims of actual abuse years back, I don't like the fact that this term is now used to describe any random "you suck" - "you suck too" discussion. In my books, abuse is about death threads, continued stalking, things like that that have a real and verifiable chances of causing psychological trauma. You calling me an abuser this easily is something I don't like and don't want to hear again. Thank you for your consideration.
Dear moderators, please give your comment on what you think about my points, and I'll make my choice. Thank you.