Junk Yard

egghead · Post by **egghead** » Sun Feb 22, 2004 2:22 am

stdragon in reply to a posting now in the Junk Yard (Edit: Right after this posting, the posting has also been purged from the Junk Yard) wrote:
Welllllll, this is a great lesson on why people should format their code properly. You have (at least) an extra curly bracket on one of your else statements, but you can't see it because of your strange formatting with if/else. Also, one of your if statements uses a ( instead of a {, which also screws things up. All in all, it looks like your only problem is a couple of typos. :p

It is a pitty to see this great lesson being trashed to the Yunk Yard. Apparently only because the subject of the posting is "Help plz".

On many forums moderators actually take the time to change the subject line if the subject of the posting may make sense to others.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the Junk Yard is a bad idea.

But, unfortunately, over the past few months I've seen some good postings being trashed. Some even had a good subject line.

Post by **caesar** » Sun Feb 22, 2004 2:43 am

First, the moderators of this forum don't have the "power" to change topics, only the administrator can do this.. so..
Two, if some people would read the Posts with poor subject lines may be deleted and the Things to do before posting.. people won't find theyr posts/replyes in the Junk Yard. Is not that I or we do this for fun, rules are made not to be broken.

He should format his code properly in the first place, not put others to do his job and format it to see where the problem lies. If he would do that then I'm shure he would find his "problem" like in two seconds or less.

Anyway, wwwweeee... this is my 2k post.

egghead · Post by **egghead** » Sun Feb 22, 2004 2:55 am

caesar wrote: [snip]
He should format his code properly in the first place, not put others to do his job and format it to see where the problem lies. If he would do that then I'm shure he ha would find his "problem" like in two seconds or less.

The point is, caesar, that the user made a TCL mistake which may appear trivial to you but maybe not to him or other users. An answer was then posted where he or other users may learn from.

It seems we disagree on the word "may" in the "Posts with poor subject lines may be deleted"

The comment "rules are made not to be broken" is a pretty poor excuse for purging the question.

Once again, I've no problem with the purging of poor postings with poor subject lines.
Postings which may contain a relevant question but with a poor subject line are a different species.

egghead · Post by **egghead** » Sun Feb 22, 2004 3:02 am

And now the posting that was less than 2 days old has been even purged from the Junk Yard.

Post by **caesar** » Sun Feb 22, 2004 10:38 am

As far as I see he/she had learned the lesson (or someone had told him/her to post again after reading the "rules") and posted again. I'm afraid I'm the guilty one of the dissapeared topic.. stdragon (if he is the one who moved it there) moved it to the Junk Yard and forgot to uncheck the "leave shadow" thing and I thought I will delete only the shadow not the entire topic, my appologies for that.

strikelight · Post by **strikelight** » Sun Feb 22, 2004 1:31 pm

I for one was glad to see it moved to the junk yard... Every single day people post topics with poor subject lines, like they didn't even bother to read the sticky post that directs them to use a descriptive topic. If they don't have the time to read that, and develop a proper topic, then they don't deserve others time in responding to them.

That's my opinion.

egghead · Post by **egghead** » Sun Feb 22, 2004 9:55 pm

strikelight wrote:[snip] If they don't have the time to read that, and develop a proper topic, then they don't deserve others time in responding to them.

That's my opinion.

If you don't want to respond to a question for whatever reason, then don't. That is not the issue here.

strikelight · Post by **strikelight** » Sun Feb 22, 2004 10:20 pm

egghead wrote:
strikelight wrote:[snip] If they don't have the time to read that, and develop a proper topic, then they don't deserve others time in responding to them.

That's my opinion.
If you don't want to respond to a question for whatever reason, then don't. That is not the issue here.

That's right... Replying to it or not replying to it was not the issue, and I never gave any indication that is what I thought the issue was. The issue is that the user in question did not take the time to read the rules of the board, and as such, had his post justifiably moved to the junk yard. Kudos to the moderators.

egghead · Post by **egghead** » Mon Feb 23, 2004 12:24 am

strikelight wrote:[snip] The issue is that the user in question did not take the time to read the rules of the board, and as such, had his post justifiably moved to the junk yard. Kudos to the moderators.

It is a pitty that you miss the issue again. Apparently you want this board to be ran like a kindergarten.

But in any case, thank you for your wonderfull contribution to this topic.

I prefer that good postings but with poor subject lines get a new subject line by the moderator. But unfortunately it appears technology does not allow it.

A suggestion could be to leave a posting breaking the rules and simply lock it with the moderator adding a note like "poor subject". In that way people see that topics get locked for improper subject lines.

Another suggestion is to put by default "Posts with poor subject lines may be deleted" in the subject line when people create a new posting.
Any posting that appears with the subject line "Posts with poor subject lines may be deleted" i.e. the user hasn't bothered to set a subject line at all, will then be trashed (automatically) to Junk Yard or to a new forum called "Posts with poor subject lines".

stdragon · Post by **stdragon** » Mon Feb 23, 2004 2:27 am

I am the one who moved that post to the junk yard after replying to it. The reason I moved it to the junk yard and left the shadow topic is so people who are making new posts can see that yes, some rules are actually enforced once in a while. And I think it is a good rule. It doesn't turn egghelp into a kindergarten, as you say egghead, it just makes it easier to browse. As for "great lessons" getting trashed... well, yes, often my lessons are great :) but how is anybody going to find it if the subject line just says "help me" or whatever? If you go to the forum search page, and enter in "kick user with message banned", you will get results like "dumb bot >_<" and "need help". Those aren't very helpful, and a person could easily overlook the right answer because they don't want to bother reading the full 75 posts that the search returns.

This forum is meant to help people, but it's not like the helpers are getting paid, right? I think it's entirely fair to expect people to phrase their subjects so that they, in turn, are providing a tiny bit of help to others with similar problems.

I was very confused when the moved topic disappeared. I'm glad it was caesar's fault and not something I had done. :) jk

As it turns out, the person reposted his problem and I gave a similar answer. The subject line still isn't that great -- I think it should be about the problem, not the name of his script -- but at least the dude tried.

stdragon · Post by **stdragon** » Mon Feb 23, 2004 2:35 am

One more note:

I believe moderators *can* change the topics of posts. All you do is click the Edit button next to the first post of the thread, and you can change the subject line and hit submit. I just tried it on one of my own posts -- I'm guessing that it works for others' posts too, as the Edit button is still there.

egghead · Post by **egghead** » Mon Feb 23, 2004 3:57 am

stdragon wrote:I am the one who moved that post to the junk yard after replying to it. The reason I moved it to the junk yard and left the shadow topic is so people who are making new posts can see that yes, some rules are actually enforced once in a while. And I think it is a good rule. It doesn't turn egghelp into a kindergarten, as you say egghead, it just makes it easier to browse. As for "great lessons" getting trashed... well, yes, often my lessons are great but how is anybody going to find it if the subject line just says "help me" or whatever? If you go to the forum search page, and enter in "kick user with message banned", you will get results like "dumb bot >_<" and "need help". Those aren't very helpful, and a person could easily overlook the right answer because they don't want to bother reading the full 75 posts that the search returns.

This forum is meant to help people, but it's not like the helpers are getting paid, right? I think it's entirely fair to expect people to phrase their subjects so that they, in turn, are providing a tiny bit of help to others with similar problems.

I was very confused when the moved topic disappeared. I'm glad it was caesar's fault and not something I had done. jk

As it turns out, the person reposted his problem and I gave a similar answer. The subject line still isn't that great -- I think it should be about the problem, not the name of his script -- but at least the dude tried.

Thanks for the comments stdragon.

The kindergarten was a reflection on "the rule is the rule, the rule was broken, and now there shall be punishment.".

The posting of yesterday was moved to the JY with a shadow left. But nowhere it gives a reason for the moving. That doesn't help much.

And it was indeed a shame to see such great lesson being moved to the JY

If you do a search on "kick user with message banned" you get over 3000 matches. A lot of them have a descriptive subject line.
Virtually none have a subject line which does make sense in relation to the search. So, the search engine does not relate to poor subject lines.

I do hope that admins will consider in the future to change bad subject lines of good postings instead of simply trashing them.
Then I will probably open another topic some day about the quality of the subject lines made by admins

stdragon · Post by **stdragon** » Mon Feb 23, 2004 4:35 am

My point about search engine results was that they *don't* have to be full of bad subject lines to cause problems. If there are 3000 results, and 99% of them have excellent subject lines like "too many arguments for proc command??", then what are the chances that you will look at a post that says "help plz"? In other words, the gems of knowledge that went into answering the "help plz" post are going to be overlooked by most people, making them much less valuable.

You're right about a couple things though. The post wasn't meant to be deleted, that was just a little accident. Also, maybe it would have been more clear if I had added a message to the thread saying "post moved to junk yard until subject line is improved" or something like that. Also, at that time, I didn't know that moderators could change subject lines of existing posts (I had never tried), so maybe that would have been even better... but still people should learn to do it themselves :p

Who knows!

egghead · Post by **egghead** » Mon Feb 23, 2004 4:55 am

stdragon wrote:but still people should learn to do it themselves :p

Who knows!

Agreed. I think it was never taught to them in kindergarten times

Blame the teachers!

Post by **caesar** » Mon Feb 23, 2004 12:30 pm

A lil tip.. By checking the "Posts" not "Topics" at the "Display results as:" is and was verry helpfull to me many times. It will dispay exactly the code or the discution that matches my search and if I see something that I belive is the answer I was looking for I check that post and read all the replyes that may give me an answer or the solution to my problem, else continue searching untill one of the folowing things happen: (re)consult the manual and check to see if I haven't done something wrong in the first place, debug the code and review it one again, ask the few friends I seem to have or post a question.

By editing the first reply of the post it seems that a moderator can change the topic name. Thanks for pointing that stdragon .. ow you one

Ps: Dose anyone here hate me? No congrats for reaching the 2k?

.. kidding..