by plinydogg » Tue May 30, 2006 8:24 pm
Pavel, why don't you think anyone will post here?
Honestly, IMHO, the fact that there aren't many posts here yet means that this forum is doing almost exactly what it's supposed to do!
GE is getting more and more popular, and as it does so, more and more people who are new to GE have more or less the same introductory questions. This is to be expected of course: when you're learning something new, you're probably going to have a lot of introductory-level questions. Nothing wrong with that. We've all been there (I'm still there a lot of the time=).
But as new GE users continue to come onboard, there is also a growing number of people who have already been onboard for a while, and for these people it makes sense to have a separate place where they can more easily get their questions answered.
In other words, someone new to GE (and/or to programming) would likely be lost in a forum where all the questions were about references, pointers, integer functions, tangents, cosines, etc. But this works both ways: someone who is NOT new to GE and who has mastered the basics is also probably lost trying to sort through the increasing number of posts about basic issues. From this standpoint, it just makes sense to separate the forums a little bit.
I'm not saying all of this as someone who is a "veteran" or an "expert." I've only recently conquered most of the basics of GE (although not all of the basics by any means!). But as my questions move more and more beyond the introductory level, it becomes more and more difficult to search for help on forums that are increasingly filled with introductory level questions.
A separate (but VERY related) issue is the fact that people still haven't learned to give their posts meaningful titles that help others who come after them find the help they need. I saw your post in which you said something like "just read the posts," and I'm not saying that's a bad idea. But for those of us with dial-up internet access (like myself, unfortunately), this can be extremely time consuming. And the fact that a lot of the time spent sifting through mountains of posts entitled "please help me for the love of god" and what not could be cut down substantially if people just slowed down for two seconds and poured a tiny modicum of thought into what they were writing makes this all the more exasperating.
The purpose in creating an "advanced" forum wasn't to say "hey, if you know a whole lot, come over here." It's sole purpose as far as I'm concerned (but I can't speak for Makslane) is to provide a spot where readers NEVER have to read a "how do I add a picture?" question.
Do you understand?