Noob invasion

[magnum9987]

Being a noob myself (yes i admit it being on this forum less than three months and not a cannon to my name) i have realized time and again that some noobs join things to express ideas and confirm knowledge they previously knew. Not all ideas are correct, or even thought of before. I know for a fact some of my ideas like the thread "Experiment for Vortex Guns" and "Airsoft Artillery?" have truly flared long debate. So, noobs should take a questionaire, which places them in several groups, and will tell us whether they shall annoy us, or be of some use.
All in all, noobs are Destined to be an annoyance, as they have not learned the full etiquette of this forum until they are vivid posters, and get feedback from members of this forum as to their behavior.

[starman]

In spudgunning, like life in general, people can usually be catagorized into 2 types...givers and takers. Givers are typically male and learn to be self-sufficient, provide for themselves and their family without handouts from other family members or government. They tend to learn the spudgunning craft from self-studying and experimenting on their own.

Takers typically are the opposite...tend to be female when grown up and willing to be "put-up" by parents, a spouse or government. Extended to spudding, they tend to ask a few how-to questions about spudgun parts and hope everything turns out OK. In spudding, they also tend to be very young and lack enough experience to be givers and thus makes them takers by default. I tend to give these guys a break, answer some fundamental questions but generally send them back to the drawing board.

These young spudders also lack a fully developed frontal lobe which can cause dumb decisions to be made and thus potentially dangerous things to happen. Our ultimate goal should be to make sure our newbies are safe no matter who they are.

I've stated this before, but I really don't care for the elitist slamming of "noobs" for the sheer sake of it. Sort of indicates an immaturity in itself.

[CS]

MrCrowley, I'm not bashing you. The problem wasn't any one person, rather collectively we were giving this guy the run around with 3 or 4 different answers.

I guess I'm just frustrated at the fact that such a simple question can take nearly a page of replies. Think about it. Thats 10 different peoples time spent writing replies, then probably 100's reading, and we still haven't pinned him down with a good answer. Seems much more reasonable that one person write a reply specifying the answer, and giving general reasoning. Overall less time, effort, and confusion.

Same reason I pitched my whole Yahoo! answer bit. To eliminate this same problem.

All the reasoning you gave is perfectly sound and reasonable. I think we just have two different approaches as how to conduct yourself on a forum. And if I may say - neither are wrong - just different.

When it comes to ignorant noobs I couldn't be any different. They just leech of the community environment, and aren't doing contributing of there own.

Jrrdw, again I would point you to the first paragraph.

I agree with your reasoning as well. Different then my own - but perfectly reasonable.

And to your bolded question...
- I think detecting intelligence in this case is all relative. Look at the confidence the poster conveys in there answer(s), any reasoning, just stuff like that.

[brogdenlaxmiddie]

...as they have not learned the full etiquette of this forum until they are vivid posters...

I' m sorry but I really don' agree with that. I have been here probably 4 times longer than you have and post count has nothing to do with etiquette. I have some 250 posts and you have 200. Post count has nothing to do with it. Its the substance. I personally don't leave too many comments that don't mean anything, posts that are mindless. I'm not saying you do but I'm explaining where I'm coming from. So, just to clear things up, count means nothing.

**Sorry for highjacking the topic, but that really bugged me**

[MrCrowley]

I wish all new members were like this guy:
http://www.spudfiles.com/forums/viewtop ... tml#195704

[magnum9987]

By vivid posters I meant learning to make more intelligent and not as much more often posts of some quality, (like i said earlier, I am still a noob, so i don't guarantee my own words).

[brogdenlaxmiddie]

OK well that makes more sense....

Sorry I was being such a jerk-wad. Its been a long day.... The people who are renting our boat slip haven't sent the check for rent and they were having a BBQ on the WOOD dock, with everyone else's boats on, and they set up a hammock across the pillings.... they are about to be removed...

[magnum9987]

I know what you mean, my wooden deck is filled with charred holes.On the subject of noobs,

The questionnaire should include a gender question, age, cannoneer experience, questions about if youve killed someone, stuff like that.

[SEAKING9006]

My suggestion is that we make the search button bigger. And yeah, a test may be good. However, it may be better just to point them DIRECTLY to an instructional that answers simple questions (what are the valves, how to spot DWV, etc) after their registration is complete. Myself, I'm adding help links to my signature.

[pizlo]

I didn't read the argument after Crowley's post about irresponsible noobs... but I think most people think of me as a helpful, contributing member of spudfiles, and I was given plans to my first gun. So you never know.
Second, I find teh search button VERY hard to use, you type in anything semi common and you get 70 useless posts because words are used to much ehre and it goes my most recent. Cmon guys type piston valve in there right now, and I bet 2 of the posts listed on the first page would help a noob building one, hold on lemme check.

EDIT: cmon guys really try it, every post on that page would not help a noobie, and there are almost 2000 pages to look though.

[ammosmoke]

I have always found the search function to be very hard to use. However, the spudwiki search is very effective. It gives you the results you want. Like jrrdw suggested, we should improve on the spudwiki a bit. Maybe add a title to the homepage that says something along the lines of, "Need to know something? Click Here," or maybe make a spudwiki search bar on the homepage with a banner directing you to it. There is actually a pretty good explanation of piston valves and such on there. Maybe a guide to the basics or something at the spudwiki homepage would be useful.

[MrCrowley]

I didn't read the argument after Crowley's post about irresponsible noobs... but I think most people think of me as a helpful, contributing member of spudfiles, and I was given plans to my first gun. So you never know.
Second, I find teh search button VERY hard to use, you type in anything semi common and you get 70 useless posts because words are used to much ehre and it goes my most recent. Cmon guys type piston valve in there right now, and I bet 2 of the posts listed on the first page would help a noob building one, hold on lemme check.

EDIT: cmon guys really try it, every post on that page would not help a noobie, and there are almost 2000 pages to look though.

70 useless topics is nothing for a search results. Two pages is all it is. I'm sure you're not lazy enough to not bother flicking through two result pages.

You're not using it properly, you need to use the words like 'AND', 'NOT' and 'OR' to get good results. It tells you how to use it and is right infront of you, no reason why you can't use it.

What you are describing is like searching 'gun' in google when you're looking for a specific make or model. You need to filter the results through what you type. Just because the search engine doesn't bring up exactly what you were looking for and that only, is no reason to say it doesn't work. Because it does. People just don't bother to learn how to use it.

Edit: Also you need to realise it's very difficult to make a search engine a whole lot better. It's doing what you told it to do. Because it brought up a result that may be irrelevant isn't it's fault. It brought up a topic that included the words you searched.

What you're describing is some how going through every single topic on the forum and adding a filter that noobs can search for so only topics with those filters will search up. Like a number e.g 97958594 could be piston valve topic.

Which can't be done, or is not practical. The only thing to do is to build on the wiki. The search is doing it's job, it's not it's fault it brings up a topic that you searched for. Just because it's irrelevant. Like I said, if it includes the words, it will be brought up. Nothing you can do to stop it.

So people need to stop blaming the search engine and start building on the Wiki. It's the only way.

[brogdenlaxmiddie]

So people need to stop blaming the search engine and start building on the Wiki. It's the only way.

I agree, with both groups. The search is sometimes really difficult to understand. But the WIKI still needs a lot of work and should be used more.

[magnum9987]

MAybe an advanced search would be best.
It would have categories like Which forum, who posted it, when it was posted, title, and keywords.

[Sticky_Tape]

That's a good Idea mag I have seen that on other forums.