Gracious Professionalism > Ungracious Unprofessionalism

[Winged Globe]

Originally Posted by Al Skierkiewicz

A new poster whether they are asking an obvious question or something that was put to bed on a previous post, needs to feel comfortable here. It may be the only way they can think of to get started. If they walked up to your pit and asked that question, you wouldn't send them away to go look somewhere else. You wouldn't berate them for their lack of knowledge of the English language or use of local colloquialisms. The point is, we need to make people feel comfortable and use this board for info and friendship. Let's welcome them in and when they are seasoned users, remind them that there are features like search. Encourage them to make their posts in a manner that everyone can understand and respect. Show them by your example that punctuation is your friend, spell checker should not be an option, and reading your post before submission is a must for self preservation. If they then choose to ignore the gentle hints...

Originally Posted by Steve W

If you see someone making a bad post or needing help with the search engine, then we should be PMing them with helpful suggestions and not slamming them with neg reps.

I think these really need to be emphasized. We've developed the "Search before you post" mantra lately. Search is a great tool that everyone should learn how to use, but:

1) I did a brief search for "search before you post" and the threads they refer to.. on a few occasions, the original poster had negative reps with total post counts less than 10. Someone had it on their first post. To the rest of us that have seen the reputation debates and made up our mind that it's not really so important, this may have little effect, but on the user's first few posts?

2) One of the great things I like about FIRST competitions is that I can go up to a really veteran team, ask a question (that may turn out to be very obvious and seemingly quite stupid), and get a courteous, helpful answer without getting a "stupid newbie" or "you should know better" feeling. I might be alone in this, but seeing everyone spout out "search before you post" doesn't quite give the same effect. If someone is asking a simple question, perhaps "I found this answer to your question in this thread using search" or "{quick answer}. If you want more details, you might want to check out this thread I found using search." If someone is making a discussion question, perhaps, "I saw some other people discussing the same topic here:". The threads can then be closed/merged/etc. Text on the internet is very impersonal, and knowing FIRST's target audience, there's the possibility that a new user has never used the internet before. Some need a special welcome into the community, and the less impersonal our responses are, the better...

"I see you're pretty new to these boards. Welcome to the ChiefDelphi community! You'll find that there's a lot of helpful people and resources here that can help answer your questions and share the FIRST experience. Regarding <topic>, there's a lot of discussion about that topic <link>here</link> already. I found it using search function, which can help you find if someone else is wondering the same thing already. There's a wonderful tutorial about how to use search here. Hope that helps, and welcome again!"

We don't build robots because it's easy, we do it because it's hard. Maybe we can work on giving new members a warmer and gentler welcome, because it's hard .