I expected for this to be easier to find: “When should I post in Discussion, and when should I post in Main?”—I’m used to forum rules being posted as stickies within the forum. I am used to seeing the forum guidelines near to the post buttons. I looked around but didn’t find them, so I thought this environment was a lot more casual than it actually is. I think these need to be put in the user’s face—since everyone else is doing that, the fact that they’re not in my face seemed to imply that you don’t have any yet. I’m not opposed to them being in the FAQ, but I am opposed to them not being linked to prominently on the post page. Considering what I’ve seen when it comes to how well users find things on websites, I think users will find the rules in the FAQ about as well as they did previously to the rules being added there...
The “What is Less Wrong?” section—needs action words. What do you DO here. What do you USE it for. Do people want to improve themselves? Do people start projects here? What kinds of exciting things happen?
I agree with making the FAQ page big as can be reasonably downloaded, assuming each question has a bold title and a link at the top. This is a wonderful place for the smorgasbord of links to go. If the most important ones were written using a variety of different terms so people can locate them with “find in page”, even better.
This link in the OP doesn’t take me where I expected to go: “if you never get voted down, you’re not posting enough”.
Sorry if this is a bit off-topic, but your account has been here for about a week and you already seem to be getting involved a lot. This is really good!
But since you are still very new it might be worth hanging around a bit to get a sense of the community. (Especially when talking about these sort of things, which are so integral to the whole website and are essentially LW’s public face.) :)
(If you’ve been lurking for a while then feel free to just ignore this comment. :) )
I’m not opposed to them being in the FAQ, but I am opposed to them not being linked to prominently on the post page.
That sounds like a good idea, but it would require a change to the LW codebase. At this point, I’m aiming to pick low-hanging fruit that doesn’t require me to familiarize myself with the LW code. If you want to familiarize yourself with the LW code and start contributing patches, that would be great!
In practice, users getting confused about Main VS Discussion doesn’t seem to be too big of a problem, even though up to now the norms have been entirely implicit. So I’m not sure it’s such a high priority that it needs to go on the about page. Though linking to the “Site Etiquette and Social Norms” section might not be a terrible idea.
If the most important ones were written using a variety of different terms so people can locate them with “find in page”, even better.
If you want to fork my version of the FAQ on your own wiki page and demonstrate this, I’ll take a look.
This link in the OP doesn’t take me where I expected to go: “if you never get voted down, you’re not posting enough”.
Thoughts On The FAQ:
I expected for this to be easier to find: “When should I post in Discussion, and when should I post in Main?”—I’m used to forum rules being posted as stickies within the forum. I am used to seeing the forum guidelines near to the post buttons. I looked around but didn’t find them, so I thought this environment was a lot more casual than it actually is. I think these need to be put in the user’s face—since everyone else is doing that, the fact that they’re not in my face seemed to imply that you don’t have any yet. I’m not opposed to them being in the FAQ, but I am opposed to them not being linked to prominently on the post page. Considering what I’ve seen when it comes to how well users find things on websites, I think users will find the rules in the FAQ about as well as they did previously to the rules being added there...
The “What is Less Wrong?” section—needs action words. What do you DO here. What do you USE it for. Do people want to improve themselves? Do people start projects here? What kinds of exciting things happen?
I agree with making the FAQ page big as can be reasonably downloaded, assuming each question has a bold title and a link at the top. This is a wonderful place for the smorgasbord of links to go. If the most important ones were written using a variety of different terms so people can locate them with “find in page”, even better.
This link in the OP doesn’t take me where I expected to go: “if you never get voted down, you’re not posting enough”.
Sorry if this is a bit off-topic, but your account has been here for about a week and you already seem to be getting involved a lot. This is really good!
But since you are still very new it might be worth hanging around a bit to get a sense of the community. (Especially when talking about these sort of things, which are so integral to the whole website and are essentially LW’s public face.) :)
(If you’ve been lurking for a while then feel free to just ignore this comment. :) )
On the contrary, new but good users are who we probably want commenting most on the FAQ.
Oh, yes, good point. I agree.
That sounds like a good idea, but it would require a change to the LW codebase. At this point, I’m aiming to pick low-hanging fruit that doesn’t require me to familiarize myself with the LW code. If you want to familiarize yourself with the LW code and start contributing patches, that would be great!
In practice, users getting confused about Main VS Discussion doesn’t seem to be too big of a problem, even though up to now the norms have been entirely implicit. So I’m not sure it’s such a high priority that it needs to go on the about page. Though linking to the “Site Etiquette and Social Norms” section might not be a terrible idea.
If you want to fork my version of the FAQ on your own wiki page and demonstrate this, I’ll take a look.
Yeah, I changed it.