What is on Your Mind?

There is a related thread in this subforum:
How Can We Increase the Size of Our Community?
Whatever solution is put in place, I think it should be checked against whether it creates any administrative overhead for the moderators.

The problem is how do you award pure amateurs like me who have no professional background in coding but give help within their limits. The THANKS button is excellent and does boost one's ego.

I started learning shell scripting here on this site in January 2013 and so far I have only scratched the surface, but boy have I done some bizarre things with shell scripting and posted them on here.

I love _banging_the_metal_, (an AMIGA turm of phrase), and have been thanked by my professional peers on here for some things I have done and to me that is thanks enough...

Bazza...

There are so many active overlapping communities, one wonders if it would be overwhelming to have all their traffic. I get email from DaniWeb, AIX/IBM forums, shellscript forums, solaris forums. I see posts here mirrored on other forums. Maybe we could have a question/answer interchange?

Many posts get no answer, as we are just too tired of people who want us to do their work for them, who cannot use google, cannot read their own docs. Some are stuck in the wrong job. Their answer is "It's not that simple."

I would agree that the system in place works well. There is the option to gift bits and while there is no trade-able value, the wonderful feeling one gets when receiving a gift is enough. Perhaps we could make that process more available, perhaps a Thanks+GiftBits or a Thanks+PM button, but then it has to be used properly rather than just being too easy and meaningless.

I'm not sure what I'm arguing for now, but perhaps there needs to be some limit on using them per user per week to give them proper kudos value.

As to the earlier quote regarding optimism versus pessimism:- .... one could argue that someone has bought a cup that is too large.


Just my thoughts,
Robin

I say half filled, for if you invert it over your head, the half empty does not protect you.

With developers, "Better is the enemy of good enough." What we have works, and we should refine it.

I stand corrected.

I feel a fool.



Robin

I think the current "Thank you" system works well amongst pros but is perhaps not easily seen by newcomers and novices.

I recently was involved in a thread where the OP spent half of his replies to me thanking me until I said not to do that, just press the Thanks button.

Perhaps the Thanks button should be more prominent (eg, a different color, flashing or something). There is plenty of instructional text on the forum about what NOT to do but I can't find much about issuing thanks when a reply is really useful.

Thanks aren't mentioned in the forum rules, a search of the general forum for Thanks yields no search result, and searching FAQ's for Thanks yields no search result.

How does a newcomer find out that the polite thing to do is to press Thanks when he/she finds the information really useful? Have I missed something?