Hi,
I have noticing a pattern in this forum. Apparently not all questions are answered. Most of the threads have 2-3 replies and many of them have even single reply(Let us hope this is not among those ) . Also some questions are simply vague which in my personal opinion doesnāt hold any importance and hence should be removed as such.
Though it is not duty of administrators but I do think that for non-Chinese devs this forum holds much importance for solving their issues ,even more than Stack Overflow(at least in my opinion). So I would advice(rather plead) that we should remove those vague questions and try to make sure that every question is answered.
Remember this is a niche forum. I do not know the statistics, but by looking at the badges page it seems like there are less than a thousand active users. Of those, you must also consider that some are c++ devs and others are js devs. Moreover, probably nobody has fully mastered cocos2d (except maybe for the devs that are working on itā¦), thus when a specific question is asked the probabilities that somebody knows the answer (and will share it) are quite low.
I agree, but you have to consider that sometimes it is hard to tell whether something is relevant or not. Considering just the irrelevant questions, you have to consider that many devs are just lazy and canāt do their due research before asking. I have seen this problem a little bit solved in other forums by imposing a timespan from the time of the registration during which the user can only navigate the forum, but I cannot tell whether it would do more good than badā¦ Another problem is that the documentation is sort of āall over the placeā (which is understandable, given this is an open source framework). Some docs are in the devsā manual, while others are in the programmersā guide, and others are only found as comments inside cocos2dās source code, and this should be enough to discourage lazy people from searching before asking.
In the community guidelines it is sort of asked that topics be relevant:
Help us make this a great place for discussion by always working to improve the discussion in some way, however small. If you are not sure your post adds to the conversation, think over what you want to say and try again later.
It could be explicitly stated that all topics must be opened before some research, and that all topics must be somehow relevant to the community, but still, only 325 out of 24024 (~1.35%) users have read the guidelines (or at least scrolled to the bottom of it to earn the badgeā¦), and probably not all of those who have read it also respect it.
@slackmoehrle I believe the devsā manual should be removed and replaced with a link to the new programming guide, but only after someone makes sure that all the relevant content has been added to the guide. If thereās info about the older v2.2 then maybe that page could have a disclaimer first: v3 go here, v2.2 go here to our old docs
This is definitely a niche forum I do agree that those numbers are further fragmented by C++ or JS. The whole notion of mine to put forward was that this is the place where non-chinese cocos developers come to discuss. For this community to succeed as a whole we must have if not all then many of questions to be solved.
But in the end they do more damage than good. These so called zombie posts must be removed to avoid clutter.
Well, I would say that @ricardo and I are the forum admins here.
When we switched to Discourse I was initially closing questions that were vague, duplicated, dis-respectful, etc. I met some resistance when doing this with the reasoning being that it is no longer an open forum, it is moderated. Users felt that this was closing the community and not opening it to more participation.
Just a few days ago, I closed a topic that was ridiculous and even gave a reason why. Wouldnāt you know the user e-mailed me to tell me that it was wrong of me to do so.
I do look for obvious SPAM and users also flag them. I act upon this daily.
So, letās do this, if you find a question that is vague or needs attention, flag it? Iālll look and we can follow-up in a month to see how this works out?
This is part of the plan. We have talked about it a lot. What it comes down to is a bit of time. Perhaps I can do it for the v3.11 launch to make sure the content we are removing, if relevant, be added to the Programmers Guide. Iāll bring it at our meeting today.
If I spend my time answering every question, I wouldnāt be able to do anything else. Full-time work and we donāt have anyone dedicated to doing it. I try and answer questions each day as well as deal with forum maintenance. Then the other parts of my job as well.
If we did, then this would become a Stack Overflow style environment. Developers would post knowing we provide every answer and our users themselves would have no reason to participate. I mean they still could, but who would want to knowing a staff member would provide an answer anyway?
I like the fact that our community members answer posts. Everyone grows from it.
This is a chicken and egg or teach a man to fish paradox.
Itās also worth noting that if every question were to be always answered, one would just open a topic asking others to write the whole code or a big part of it for him and wait for an answer, and that seems quite excessive (at least to me) given that everything here is free and nobody is paid for contributing (as far as I know).
I can help with this one if itās a desired thing? Maybe tell me in a PM what youāre doing for 3.11 and I can look at minimum transferring over any missing AND relevant content.
Youāll have to take care of gracefully āremovingā it from the main site ideally with just a disclaimer and an extra re-direction to discourage anyone looking for it, but the permalink(s) should probably stick around for another year or so in terms of google searches. We could however document and reference the guide on every page, or section? Maybe add a small note. Link to the guide en-masse to start and then provide deeper links into the guideās sections that relate to the old docs.
I think the guide could be updated before 3.11 code is released. Anyway, let me know what I can help with as usually it takes much more time just to figure out whatās needed and I donāt want to duplicate any workā¦
Lastly, we (purposefully trying to make this āweā the community of yāall and us) could maybe compile a list of features not yet in the guide, or those that could be fleshed out more to offer more than just the simplest version of a feature or topic? Maybe do another tutorial-style giveaway to submit a written version of any non-bug tests from cpp-tests that are not explained in the guide yet?
I totally understand where you come from, burden is too much for you guys to handle. Why donāt we have some code recipes wiki styles where almost(how to do that is tricky part) anyone can edit and improve , since then future newbie devs would benefit from it.
As I said I donāt think that this should be burden on forum admins though they should encourage it ,though you guys have been doing that job perfectly. More community becomes more knowledgeable ,more it will give it back to itself.
On side note, more I read this thread more I realize that we should have wiki system of documentation , where community powers itself. I guess it is much more liberating than having to send pull request This however is my opinion. What are your thoughts?
Rather than doing that why donāt we do it version style. Of course current links should work as such.I wonāt suggest removing documentation because somewhere some innocent dev must be using old version target ted by that documentation But if you notice documentation of laravel. They do like this
Now here if you notice then it is fairly easy to see that we are maintaining both documentation.
We have a Cocos Product Group meeting each Wednesday night (well my Wednesday night) and what came out of it last night is that we will have a unified docs system. It will be at cocos2d-x.org/documentation.
For January 11, this will be live with the Cocos documentation and the Programmers Guide. I will then be adding user guides for our tools and the API ref will be there as well. Old links from the Programmers Guide will still work as I will make a redirect for each chapter to the new location in this new way. Search is important here as a user will be able to search for Sprite they get everything about it. We also will remove the Wiki and re-direct it to this new location as well. We will need to look at the Wiki to make sure things that are still relevant are put into this new system.
I would love your help. I will open a new topic and ask for suggestions about content we should add. users can vote and we will add content in that order, deemed by our community
I was supposed to have JavaScript in the v3.10 guide, but I wont have it all done for January 11, so I will be adding the rest after.
The staging version of the v3.10 PG is here: http://slackmoehrle.github.io and this link will be changing today to start the unified docs system
If anyone is good with CSS. I really could use some help.
I donāt mind off topic questions to do with 3rd party things such as āHow do I integrate parseā or something like that thereās always gona be someone trying to do something similar. It just annoys me when people post the most basic coding questions which are simply just a lack of coding knowledge and instead of posting on a c++ related forum or something they post here.
But on the other hand more posts make the forum look more active which is always a good thing.
In regards to the documentation I was thinking the most comprehensive list of cocos2d-x features is probably CPP-tests, wouldnāt it be easiest to just step through each one and see if itās a feature worth mentioning in the programmerās guide. Obviously some topics are more important or have more relevance than others, e.g. Sprite. Then plug it in to the guide.
There is one thing I think is really lacking in the documentation and that is setup and configuration for windows phone. Especially the Windows phone 10 of course, which is understandable since itās fairly new.
Yeah, that would be the ideal goal. Sorry I was replying with a much more focused and narrow thought process and was intentionally discussing just the newcomer (and bleeding edge user) use case. Your reminder is great at this point in time if the goal is to improve things.
The github repo for the new guide has a branch for each minor version since 3.6, so this is possible going forward. Obviously the default would be latest and greatest, but the older versions should be available.
This should also be done for the API Reference online and every version has been put up online, but the links reference only the latest in each major version (2.2.6 and 3.9). These have been archived and all are available for each minor version as far as I can tell:
v3.3 for example: http://www.cocos2d-x.org/reference/native-cpp/V3.3/index.html
My comment about updating the docs before 3.11 (or rather out of band) was that I think archiving the old docs out of focus (searchable, findable, not prominent) is orthogonal to getting the v3.11 docs ready and released. Again lets find a way to not remove them, but just make it more visible which version(s) the information is discussing.
Anyway, hopefully we find everything greatly improved in a few months.
Historically, you probably downloaded a .zip from the website or if you stayed a hipster and pulled from the GitHub repo. Downloading the .zip will no longer be available. Github, however, will always remain available.
What are the plans for handling not offering zip files? So are you planning to release a robust version of the Cocos tool? And is the goal to have everyone download the framework/engine and create new projects from that?
Edit: I see that is the goal. Is this robust yet? Have you tested it? Iām curious to see how well this goes. Iām hoping for the best. I do think all versions up until the tool is released in a robust form should be available still as downloads which include the associated 3rd party binaries. Maybe github can host these?
) . Also some questions are simply vague which in my personal opinion doesnāt hold any importance and hence should be removed as such.
