BigDumbDinosaur wrote:
Organization as a skill is not easily taught and is mostly learned from observation.
Which is not to say that there aren't some decent books (and presumably web pages or entire sites) about learning the habit of organization. Julie Morgenstern's
Organizing from the Inside Out comes to mind, for example, but the basics and some practical advice can be summed up in a couple of thousand words, maybe less.
I'll also note that chalking up repeated bad experiences with forums to "luck" is profoundly disempowering. Luck is largely outside of one's control. If you look at the matter as one of "I'm doing something wrong, somehow", that is
entirely within your control. The possibility exists that the "something wrong" is selecting a community that is not a good fit for you to attempt to join or interact with, and that can be determined by lurking for a while and watching someone
else attempt to join the community, or simply looking at the interaction on the forum over the past however long (the last month, or even week, worth of posts would give a good feel for the local community in any reasonably active forum). Once you know how a community interacts, try to match that, or to be even more formal (in most places, I'd expect that long-time contributors get cut a lot more slack than newbies).
Oh, and doing your own initial research (google, or any other search engine, is your friend in this) is the most straightforward way to respect other people's time. A second approach is to not necessarily ask for the answer directly, but to explain what you've done and where you've looked and ask what else you should have done / checked in attempting to find the answer yourself. This signals that you're at least
trying, and that you're willing to learn, not merely have the answers spoon-fed to you.
I'll admit, I winced when looking at the recent activity when I signed up for my account, a week and a half ago now, because I could see a storm of newbieish posts. But I was having trouble with my free-run circuit, had managed to narrow it down to just the oscillator, made an introductory post as appeared to be a community norm (and not an unusual one for small communities), and then followed up with a post describing my problem, the sources that I had been using, the observed effects, some of the tools that I had available, and so on. And I had a very quick response which noted, almost in passing, precisely where I screwed up. I've since had input on a couple of other threads. I'm still a newbie here, but I'd like to think that I've made a decent initial impression. But starting slowly, doing a lot of my own research, and being polite has typically worked for me.
-- Alastair Bridgewater
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. So this is not surprising getting bashed on for dumb questions
