This is an intentionally click-baity title and it’s meant to be. I know we are all in the heat of the season, and tensions and stress are higher than normal. So when you divine a title that says something is “broken” or “wrong” or “not working”, your alleging a deficiency against someones hard work even though you may not mean to besyaing it so strongly. Just like you may have felt attacked by my title, when I read the titles below, I can’t help but feel sorry for the gracious people that put their (paid sometimes, mostly unpaid) hard work into making a tool to make your build season better and easier
If I’m being too thin-skinned about this, go ahead call me out on it, and I’ll chalk this up to my upbringing where what I did was constantly critiqued /hj. I do believe there are better ways we can title our forum “help me”. Titles like the below may be better:
Trouble with Red/Blue calculations with Limelight Robot rotating incorrect direction with CTRE Swerve API Robot not executing Choreo Autopaths Robot going in wrong direction using PathPlanner Trouble with generating PathPlanner paths Code and PhotonVision reporting different distances Our robot is way off PathPlanner
The reason I think this is important is that all of the issues above are software issues. By the time we get to build season, most of the bugs have been worked out already. Most of the time there’s something wrong with your code and your robot. Even if you happen to have found a true bug, it’s better to have initially erred on the side that most likely there’s something wrong with your circumstances than not.
One exception (maaaybe) I’d maybe have to this rule is this one because the user had taken the time to dive into the source and separate the library from the individual robot conditions and took time to log a PR to fix the issue:
Edit:: One small thing I forgot to add. This is an important skill when writing emails and subject lines to your classmates and colleagues. A soft tone on your communication will go further than if you called someone’s baby (hard work) “ugly”.
Am I off base? Should we be be more careful with our forum titles, or meh?
I don’t see this as an issue. In both of these types of forum posts the point is understood: someone is asking for help with a certain technology. I don’t think the creators are feeling personally attacked by the titles.
Absolutely. There’s a reason the industry standard term is “issue.” It’s a lot less emotionally charged. An issue might be a misunderstanding on the reporter’s end or it could be a a bug in the software, but we don’t assume either way.
That said, the title you chose would lead people to assume you are referring to an issue with the Chief Delphi site. To practice what you preach, while still being provocative, perhaps “You’re reporting issues wrong.” Or “Your communication is ‘broken.’” Just an idea
I chalk this up to many of these posts being made by students who treat forum posts similar to other more short-form social media (Discord, Instagram, etc.). I don’t think forcing members to strictly follow etiquette is a good solution, especially if they are new. If anything, I think this feeds into the perception that CD is ‘scary’ and that deters students from asking for help here.
Maybe a system where more regular CD members can ask for updates to topic titles is a better solution?
I don’t read something like “thingxyz is calculating the wrong abc” as criticizing the makers of thingxyz, but instead as saying “we haven’t gotten thingxyz configured/installed/programmed right yet and so we’re getting bad data”
Posts like this are why people hesitate to ask for
help on the internet. People are stuck and don’t know what to do are then are criticized on how they ask for help.
While I agree more accurate language can be a benefit, that’s assuming that the asker KNOWS the correct terminology. If they had your knowledge and experience they wouldn’t be asking for help.
It seems reasonable in this sport of gracious professionalism that we extend some courtesy and understanding…especially since many of the people looking for help are kids having their first engineering experience.
Generally in the cases where the request isn’t clear, more information is quickly gleaned in the thread.
“swerve code broken” is not a useful title. It is unclear what the thread is really asking, and makes it hard to use the search for the same thread in the future.
We all judge threads (books) by their title (cover) being more explicit really does help get those that know what’s up into the thread quicker.
But we also have to realize a lot of folks have only posted in an online forum a few times (if that), and they are often frustrated in the moment. Tearing questions to shreds (like what happens on stack overflow) is a very subpar experience that makes you wanna quit.
I think the best course of action is to normalize the use of
"OP, please update thread title with more details, something like: Trouble with Red/Blue calculations with Limelight "
If we normalize the helping on titles/tags and accept the fact that succinct communication is difficult we will all be better for it.
Your concern and annoyance is certainly warranted. If some of the questions I saw here were asked to me professionally by someone doing paid work, I’d label the person as incompetent and question why they were getting paid.
However, given the large number of actual-students and adults-just-starting-to-learn-something on this platform, my tolerance is calibrated much higher.
As the author of the referenced thread my intent was to be direct and somewhat alarming. I feel Sysid can already be confusing enough even if you know how to use it and it is working properly. We sunk 3 hours trying to get a usable run of SysID data before we dug in and found the bug. I wanted to draw attention to save other teams the same frustration that we went through.
One thing to remember is that a team just finding a forum where they can ask for help is half the battle. So many teams do not have a lot of help, and just getting a question out in public, even if it’s not worded correctly, is 100% better than them just not asking for help at all. We don’t want to make the teams that are asking questions like that feel unwelcome at all, as those are the teams that likely need more help and don’t have the in house mentors to help.
I really understand and value where y’all are coming from. And if asking \ training our community to have more accurate and helpful titles comes at the expense of not asking for help at all, well then, im with you!
While i personally dont think my reworded titles were that much different in word usage, again if we think asking people to tidy up their posting will discourage questions getting asked, then im fine also ‘calibrating up’ my tolerance.
I do like these ideas as good opportunities for our community to learn:
I also want to call out @gerthworm and shame him (/s) for spying into my soul as probably i experience too much of this at work and was probably projecting my emotions onto the more patient volunteer \ paid software developers in our community who read the titles and aren’t as triggered by it as I am\was.
At my job (software developer) I recently reported a bug titled “thing in the software is easily broken”, because after a small number of entirely likely steps the thing started acting unusually in a number of different ways and the console started throwing errors (eventually). Usually I write bug reports with a little more detail in the title, because I either have a good idea about what in the steps caused the bug or literally know the cause, but in this case it was with our other main software product that I haven’t actually written any code for, and “easily broken” was the best summary I could come up with without presupposing what was wrong or being too verbose or overly precise (I’ve had a few bugs titled something like “doing condition 1, 2, 3, and 4 will cause X”).
In my opinion, we should be more careful with our fourm names. For one if I see “x API broken” and it’s user error, you’ve caused a little panic to the developers, and others that use it. This fourm would be so much easier to search CD in general and understand if the titles were, “Having trouble with X API”, etc.
