Tutorials Section Re-opening

[popey]

On the other hand, the tutorials and tips section allowed an ongoing conversation with the OP which can help maintain the quality of the tutorial, questions are asked in the thread, things move forward and the documentation is improved.

So like Elfy said in the first post, we are revisiting the question and would appreciate some input.

Your reply explains why it was changed in the first place. It doesn't explain why you're considering re-opening it again.

Have all the disadvantages of the "old way" gone away / been fixed?

What triggered this discussion?

[Elfy]

...

What triggered this discussion?

The feeling that it was a mistake in the first place.

[popey]

The feeling that it was a mistake in the first place.

Thanks.

What changed? Has what was broken previously been fixed?

[Elfy]

Was it broken in the first place?

The feeling when it was changed in the first place was that the tutorials would be better on the wiki.

Shortly after the change was put in place much work was done in transforming threads into wiki's with a place here to discuss said.

Since that time little has been done, there appears to be little interest in either area now.

If you've got information available to you about the use of the community wiki in the last year with regard to creation of new wiki's that we haven't then now is the time to bring it up.

[popey]

Was it broken in the first place?

In that there were publicly viewable, easily discoverable and wildly inaccurate tutorials which were not maintained, and effectively not maintainable by people other than OP and staff, yes, broken.

The feeling when it was changed in the first place was that the tutorials would be better on the wiki.

Technically the feeling was that they should be moved to somewhere that facilitated editing by someone other than OP / staff, the wiki being the chosen candidate.

My question "is it fixed" is simply to find out if the issue of "only OP and staff can edit" has been resolved, because that's a very real issue.

If you've got information available to you about the use of the community wiki in the last year with regard to creation of new wiki's that we haven't then now is the time to bring it up.

Is that the only metric by which you're deciding to revive this broken feature?

[Doug S]

By design, the forums are an excellent place to ask questions and have a threaded discussion driving towards understanding and solving whatever issue is raised. The forums include many tools to assist: Searches to help find previously covered threads to perhaps reference; Multiple methods, with varying degrees of either pushing (via e-mail) or pulling via checking one's own personal area, to track threads or particular interest; Various methods for monitoring favorite or respected contributors; and on and on. Idiosyncrasies aside (everything seems to have some) and while they continue to evolve, the forums are pretty optimised for such use.

Similarly the community wiki pages are an excellent place for all to create and maintain clear tutorials and documentation in general. They are easy to update and change, by anyone, and has been mentioned in earlier posts, the original writer can drop out of it at any time. Just as the forums have been optimised for their purpose, the wiki has been optimized for its purpose.

Someone mentioned: "Ongoing discussion with the OP": Isn't that also possible with the wiki? Go to the history page, click on the desired name and "contact the user" via their launchpad page.

It is just my opinion, but I do not understand why the forums tutorials section would be re-opened.

[FakeOutdoorsman]

I think this is good news, but it may be a little late. The "after 24 hours your post becomes locked to editing" rule, the "we are going to close T&T and move content no matter what" attitude of the moderators (including the weird, unexpected name calling and accusations from one in particular), and the closing of T&T burned some of the active contributors.

I don't know if it will recover if reopened due to a sense of a lack of stability; at least for those who have experienced these changes.

[castrojo]

Isn't that also possible with the wiki? Go to the history page, click on the desired name and "contact the user" via their launchpad page.

You don't even have to do that, each wiki page/tutorial could just have a link to a forum discussion, so that the content remains editable but people can still get the personalized Q+A they want. That way we can have editable tutorials but not have them locked up where the community can't edit them.

[andrew.46]

Sounds like good news, I would certainly be interested in participating in T&T again. The closure was a difficult time, hopefully the reopening will bring some healing all round...

[Bodsda]

I personally don't like the idea of community wide editable tutorials. I would prefer to see the old T&T back to how it was, but with mandatory information such as version numbers so that the reader knows exactly what environment was used when the tutorial was written and tested. If the reader decides to run the steps on a different setup then they know that they may experience different results.

If this was on the wiki, it would be very difficult to confirm if the current start-to-finish procedure had been tested because anyone can come along and change any part of it. It may also end up evolving into something that it was never intended to be, which could be a good thing, or it could mean that a simple tutorial to achieve a specific task gets churned into an essay on application usage.

The other thing about T&T was that it was moderated heavily, you wouldn't get away with adding malicious tutorials because the threads had to be approved, and whilst I doubt every tutorial was attempted by a mod I hope I am right in saying that they reviewed the content. The wiki on the other hand could be changed maliciously with very few people getting alerted.

On top of that, the Tutorial of the Week thread gave a brilliant selection of top class tutorials and at the same time served as an incentive to produce top notch stuff.

In conclusion, I am heavily in favor of returning to the traditional T&T; with a few tweaks.

Bodsda