Featured Articles
Announcing Pi
Technical Specifications
Raspberry Pi FAQs
Win a Pi
Raspberry Pi Wishlist
Actions
Forum Thread Details
  • Replies 104 replies
  • Subscribers 709 subscribers
  • Views 20032 views
  • Users 0 members are here
Related

Re: Pi Forums

johnbeetem

coder27 wrote:

 

According to the book author, Element14 is doing a terrific job:

http://www.feverbee.com/2012/05/key-lessons-from-a-terrific-branded-online-community.html


I think element14 owes a lot to RasPi and its Foundation.  I joined element14 on RasPi Launch Day 29 Feb 2012 when raspberrypi.org locked their site so they wouldn't be overwhelmed with traffic.  There was lots of unsatisfied interest in RasPi and lots of unanswered questions, so a number of us who had been following RasPi saw a need to answer the easy questions and direct people to the RasPi Wiki for more details.  When RasPi came back, cranky admins and moderators had short fuses and a lot of people got banned from there.  I sympathize because they were being overwhelmed, but I think it's generally better to get a good night's sleep and answer questions tomorrow than to snap at someone today.  OTOH, different people have different approaches to life.  Banned people who still had questions to ask and things to say gravitated here, and some became some of our top contributors.

 

Then there were all sorts of delivery problems, and RasPi told everybody to talk to the distributors rather than have RasPi get definitive answers and post summaries.  Fine, that moved a lot of traffic here, and people discovered there were people who knew what they were talking about and you could talk freely about issues here without being banned.

 

Then there were problems with LAN chips overheating, which RasPi insisted couldn't happen in spite of evidence that was developed here.  So that gave element14 credibility.  Just mentioning the issues at RasPi would likely get you banned.

 

So yeah -- element14 did a terrific job with RasPi by just providing a good forum where people could discuss things freely, and while we've had occasional trolls the moderators here have only had to intervene occasionally.  Perhaps we're just lucky that people here are nice and show respect to the opinions of others even when the discussions get intense.

 

And now RasPi has removed the link to the RasPi Wiki from their front page.  So we'll probably get even more traffic here.  I've always thought that answering questions on forums is great for the short run, but at some point interested parties need to update a Wiki for long run support or they'll end up answering the same FAQs over and over.

Parents

  • This is to about 6 people. Many thanks for your efforts on my behalf and your replies. I'm feeling rather weary as I haven't had my after lunch nap and will be getting ready for bed after this. I'll read your replies more carefully tomorrow and hope to get the RPi connected up again. It's not easy as SWMBO gets very concerned when she sees me doing anything that requires mental or physical effort, so I try to do it very early in the morning. (I had a slight stroke recently.)

    I'm a bit of a nit-picker, so I like John's comment about the spelling of "complement".

  • in reply to e14 Contributor

    Frank

     

    I can never aspire to be as good a writer as Mark Twain, Thomas Jefferson, W. C. Fields or any number of worthy gentlefolk who despised spellling. Although the actual provenance of the genre of quotes that contain the meme "I have nothing but contempt for anyone who can spell a word only one way" is unknown, I take it as a truism. At best it demonstrates a lack of imagination.  I do believe that it is a skill [?] which will go the way of the buggywhip industry as spell checkers continue to encompass an ever increasing share of the written word.

  • in reply to groaker

    Michael Tria wrote:

     

    I can never aspire to be as good a writer as Mark Twain, Thomas Jefferson, W. C. Fields or any number of worthy gentlefolk who despised spellling. Although the actual provenance of the genre of quotes that contain the meme "I have nothing but contempt for anyone who can spell a word only one way" is unknown, I take it as a truism. At best it demonstrates a lack of imagination.  I do believe that it is a skill [?] which will go the way of the buggywhip industry as spell checkers continue to encompass an ever increasing share of the written word.

    The problem with a spell-checker is that it doesn't know the difference between "compliment" ("nice hat!") and "complement" (that which completes).  Newpapers nowadays no longer have spelling errors or "etaoin shrdlu" but you see phrases repeated see phrases repeated and <figure caption goes here>.

     

    Here's my favorite Mark Twain quote regarding spelling (from memory, may be apocryphal):

    Good spelling is important.  I knew a man who spent a night in a Warehouse because he couldn't spell.

     

    Mark Twain also said (again from memory): "The man who refuses to read Good Books does nothing to distinguish himself from the man who cannot."  The quote also works if you substitute "Documentation" for "Good Books", or substitute "spell properly" for "read Good Books".

     

    OTOH, Mark Twain also said (still from memory): "A Classic is a book everybody talks about but nobody reads".  I assume he wrote this before his own books became classics. image

  • in reply to johnbeetem

    but you see phrases repeated see phrases repeated

     

    For fun, try googling for "the the" at this site.

    It gives something like 3,510 results.

Reply Children
No Data