|
|
I frequently find myself pointing users with questions in the forums at various articles that I've either bookmarked or written. I think it'd be nice to have yet another button that brings up a window containing the collection of bookmarked articles and articles the author has written. When clicked, it inserts a link (with the option to open it in a new window like the link[^] button) at the current insertion point in the reply textbox. This would certainly make this process easier.
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.21
GCS/G/MU d- s: a- C++++ UL@ P++(+++) L+(--) E--- W+++ N++ o+ K? w++++ O- M(+) V? PS-- PE Y++ PGP++ t++@ 5 X+++ R+@ tv+ b(-)>b++ DI++++ D+ G e++>+++ h---* r+++ y+++
-----END GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
|
|
|
|
|
What's with the unedited articles? Are you going for the CodeGuru effect? 
I thought it was a temporary measure to relieve the load and that someone would get around to editing them properly some day. Now they're just taking over like weeds in an untended garden.
Some areas have a huge list of unedited articles (larger than the edited and categorized ones) which are a mish mash of all sorts of things that take forever to pore over if your looking for anything in particular (and many of them are quite bad and probably would have not been accepted if they went through *any* kind of review process).
Articles are really the core of why people come to this site, it's starting to look like the essential nature of this site is being neglected in favor of ever cooler forums etc.
Is CodeProject "jumping the shark"?
I suggest that the unedited articles get "edited" and properly categorized and that no more new ones are added without going through a review process. It's exactly that process that separates CP from the billion and one other source code sites out there. (or at least it's what *used* to separate CP from them, it's getting harder to tell now).
And for pity's sake: Add a true beginner section and ask people to write some articles for it. It's been asked for long enough. I want a place to send people who have nothing more than an internet connection, a windows pc and a willingness to learn how to program.
It could be a real coup for CodeProject as there is nothing like it out there now. A step by step guide to getting the .net framework for example, installing that free c# IDE, on to their first "hello world", "What is an object?" etc etc. Enough to bring an absolute beginner up to where they could benefit from all the other articles.
People love to write articles when they know it's within their level of competence and CP could be the premier site for learning to program.
|
|
|
|
|
John Cardinal wrote:
And for pity's sake: Add a true beginner section and ask people to write some articles for it.
I'm thinking I'll write som myself, when I get some time. i have a brother who's learning programming, and would benefit from beginner's articles, so I have someone to test them before submitting them.
|
|
|
|
|
Hello John
Smitha and I, specially Smitha, and a bunch of volunteer editors have been working on the unedited backlog for the past few months. In fact, while I do not have exact figures, together we must have been editing and moving around 350-400 unedited articles each month. The reasons there still is a huge number of unedited articles are that, there was a really large number of them when we started this large-scale moving process and also, nearly every day people contribute more articles.
Some of the articles are left in the unedited section, because the authors have requested that they be left there. But the other articles are being worked on regularly. We try to choose articles that are well written, have interesting content or cover topics not covered by other articles. At times we also consider ratings (choosing higher rated ones over lower rated ones) as a criteria in deciding whether an article should be given priority over another.
Editing and moving an article is not a 5 minute job. We have to go through the entire article, verify that basic grammar is maintained, fix all typos and spelling errors, reformat the HTML completely, resize pictures as and when needed, sometimes fix broken links, external links, verify downloads, remove temp files from downloads etc. So the unedited backlog won't disappear in a day or even a week. In fact things are made harder for Smitha and me, by the fact that we are in a really 3rd world city with no affordable stable-bandwidth options. But we are doing our best and eventually we hope to reach a stage of equilibrium where the unedited article list is kept to a minimum number so that new articles can be quickly edited and moved (unless the authors want it otherwise).
I am not sure if my post has made sense to you, but I just wanted to let you know that, the lapses - if any, are not due to lack of effort.
Regards
Nish
Extending MFC Applications with the .NET Framework [NW] (coming soon...)
Summer Love and Some more Cricket [NW] (My first novel)
Shog's review of SLASMC [NW]
This post was made from Trivandrum city, India on a 0.0001 KB/s net connection
|
|
|
|
|
So maybe CP needs more editors?
Regards,
Rohit Sinha
Browsy
Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person.
- Mother Teresa
|
|
|
|
|
Hi Nish, sounds like a lot of work but on the right track. I realize it's time consuming and painful to do, but if it was my site that's exactly what I'd be doing.
It's a bit of a mystery to me why there are still new unedited articles allowed and also why some authors are requested they remain unedited?
Surely that's something you guys should be putting your foot down on? (Isn't that a bit like trying to bail water out of a boat while keeping a hole in the bottom?)
Sorry for your bandwidth woes.
|
|
|
|
|
John Cardinal wrote:
why some authors are requested they remain unedited
So that they can keep updating the article as often as they wish without having to go through the editing process. Once an article is edited, you need to ask the editor to make any change. You can update an unedited article on your own though (if you are the author).
Regards,
Rohit Sinha
Browsy
Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person.
- Mother Teresa
|
|
|
|
|
Indeed - the difference has been quite noticeable since Smitha joined the team! 
Nishant S wrote:
This post was made from Trivandrum city, India on a 0.0001 KB/s net connection
Look at the world about you and trust to your own convictions. - Ansel Adams
Meg's World - Blog
Photography - The product of my passion
|
|
|
|
|
Part of CPs uniqueness is that articles are published without an intermediary editor approval process.
You hit submit and there in front of 700k devs is your article, live from New York to Hong Kong, from Sydney to London, from Cape Town to Nova Scotia.
It is a pretty incredible concept, one that does require some give and take by us viewers.
Introduce a mandatory editor step and it becomes just another article website.
If you start reading an unedited article, realise it is a crap article and get annoyed, then best you stick to the edited sections. I don't mind going through the unedited because for every 5 bad ones there is 1 great article.
my 2 cents.
As for the beginners section, what do you propose? I would be keen to help out but it is a big task and needs to be done properly, with some planning. I would think a far reaching contents list would need to be drawn up and an article or two done each month, each one tackling a certain topic.
regards,
Paul Watson
Bluegrass
South Africa
Brian Welsch wrote:
"blah blah blah, maybe a potato?" while translating my Afrikaans.
Crikey! ain't life grand?
|
|
|
|
|
Ouch! Well I wouldn't post suggestions if I didn't care, apathy is a far graver problem than a "bad" suggestion. 
Actually, I half agree with you and half don't. My real concern with the unedited articles is they are all automatically placed in the "Unedited" articles section.
A compromise would be to somehow identify them as unedited, but still get them categorized with more granularity.
That's my real point I guess, right now it's a needle in a haystack situation.
Beginners section:
Here is where this came from, I have a friend that want's to learn to program, he has an internet connection and no money. I tried to find a site to point him to that would give him the beginning steps of explaining what programming is about, steps to acquire free tools from the internet to get started: .Net framework, the free IDE (SharpDevelop I think it's called), etc. Enough to get all the tools required. Then a series of "hello world", what is an object, language rules and syntax, where to find more language details (msdn) etc.
Enough to bring a person up to where they can get going on their own with the help of the existing articles on CP when they want to do something specific.
What would be required is some collaboration of suggestions by people on what the outline would be, then break it into segments for separate articles.
The key being small simple things that get some interesting results while teaching a concept.
I support two teams: the Canucks and whoever is playing the Leafs!
|
|
|
|
|
I suggested we have a competition whereby a list of articles are proposed and members then compete to fill out those articles. If we can do that then I have prizes to giveaway. The trick is to work out a method whereby we can have a list and somehow generate the best articles possible without frustrating authors. Maybe two people submit the same article, or maybe an article is written and it's poor quality so another author replaces the article. Angst all round.
I want to do this, so lets think of a way.
cheers,
Chris Maunder
|
|
|
|
|
Chris Maunder wrote:
I suggested we have a competition whereby a list of articles are proposed and members then compete to fill out those articles.
Excellent idea! Lot's more people would probably write articles if a goal was set before them.
Chris Maunder wrote:
Maybe two people submit the same article, or maybe an article is written and it's poor quality so another author replaces the article
I'm not exactly an "expert" programmer but I have no problem with people giving constructive criticism so if the first effort isn't ideal it can be improved with help from others. That should be something emphasized in all this as most people are probably afraid to post an article because they don't feel confident enough in their skills when it's going to be seen by so many people.
Chris Maunder wrote:
The trick is to work out a method whereby we can have a list and somehow generate the best articles possible without frustrating authors
Well it seems to me that people can just take on an article, publish it and then everyone gets a chance to review it and make suggestions. Or if more than one person wants to do an article they can co-author it?
Better to do a bit of planning and try something to see what happens and improve it the next time around than to burn cycles trying to account for every possible problem.
Kind of like how we write software: when we have a large new project coming up we do a small subset of it that covers all the new features as a test then we do the real thing.
|
|
|
|
|
John Cardinal wrote:
.Net framework, the free IDE (SharpDevelop I think it's called), etc.
How's this[^] for the first tutorial? (Currently a Word doc, but I'll upload it to CodeProject as soon as I can if you like it.) Is the length right, or should I cover more per tutorial?
|
|
|
|
|
Yes, but perhaps a step before that on what the .net framework is and how to install it.
Then in this one, strictly how to install SharpDevelop would be best then separate articles on "your first program" etc.
Part of a "chain" of articles maybe (Part 1, part 2) so people know what order to take them in?
Some of the stuff you mentioned by be a bit confusing though like mentioning "base classes" near the start etc. I guess if you described what it was about without using the terminology yet that might be better?
Any terminology up front usually will confuse half the people and have the other half thinking they are supposed to know it to proceed. Maybe say "base classes (it's not important to know this term yet it will be covered later).."
I support two teams: the Canucks and whoever is playing the Leafs!
|
|
|
|
|
John Cardinal wrote:
Yes, but perhaps a step before that on what the .net framework is and how to install it.
Then in this one, strictly how to install SharpDevelop would be best then separate articles on "your first program" etc.
Part of a "chain" of articles maybe (Part 1, part 2) so people know what order to take them in?
OK, I'll try that and see how that goes.
Hmm...
Part 1 - Getting Started: Installing the .NET Framework and SharpDevelop
Part 2 - Hello World in C#
An simple console application that introduces some basic programming concepts (statement, comment, expression, method, etc)
Part 3 - (Don't know what to call it)
Goes into more depth in explaining programming concepts - operators, variables, etc.
Part 4 - Intro to OOP
Part 5 - Intro to Windows Forms and the #Develop Forms Designer
John Cardinal wrote:
I guess if you described what it was about without using the terminology yet that might be better?
Any terminology up front usually will confuse half the people and have the other half thinking they are supposed to know it to proceed.
You're probably right. I'll change that.
|
|
|
|
|
You know, what would be really  would be somewhere where we could take our articles to be discussed by other article authors before they went live. Maybe a special article collaboration section or something? I think that would increase the likelihood that people would contribute, because then it isn't going "live" and then having people make negative comments because of something that they didn't know about about formatting, wording or whatever.
The Article Suggestions forum might make do, but 1) people might not be lucky enough to have a hosting area like I do, and 2) it would drown out the suggestions and requests, which is what that forum is about.
|
|
|
|
|
Yes! Very good idea!
You should post it as a new thread here so it get's noticed by the "Powers That Be"(tm).
I support two teams: the Canucks and whoever is playing the Leafs!
|
|
|
|
|
And one more reply...
I'm changing:
...it will prompt you to build a Code Completion Database, which contains information on the .NET base classes. This information is used to power the code completion, or “intellisense”.
to:
...it will prompt you to build a Code Completion Database, which contains information that is used to power the code completion, or “intellisense”.
|
|
|
|
|
And yet another reply! 
I don't have any computer currently available that doesn't have SharpDevelop and/or the .NET Framework on it, and I'm not really in the mood to uninstall and re-install just for the screenshots. I don't remember the exact step either, but I think I mostly just pressed next to everything for both installations.
|
|
|
|
|
I think there should be a new category for the Message Boards: Faking a Real World Problem in Order to Get a CS Assignment Done.
My neighbours think I am crazy - but they don't know that I have a trampoline. All they see my head bobbing up and down over the fence every five seconds
|
|
|
|
|
|
I've noticed that quite often when someone posts a programming question in the lounge, it's their first post in the lounge (or anywhere on cp for that matter).
If it's possible, perhaps the message board software could determine if it's their first post in either that forum or anywhere on cp and if it's not a programming forum, display a popup asking if it's a programming related question and presenting the drop down box of programming forums, or maybe just a popup with some sort of clear message and a choice of alternatives.
Note that it would do it the first time only, this should catch most. I know it's an extra burden on the sql server etc, but perhaps when they login it's kept as some sort of session variable until they do post? Not sure how the message board works, but thought I would toss the idea into the hopper anyway.
I support two teams: the Canucks and whoever is playing the Leafs!
|
|
|
|
|
That flag could go in a cookie. You'd get the popup the first time you posted from a particular computer (or after clearing cookies), but it would mean no extra server-side storage.
I like it 
--Mike--
Ericahist | CP SearchBar v2.0.2 | Homepage | RightClick-Encrypt | 1ClickPicGrabber
Pinky, are you pondering what I'm pondering?
I think so Brain, but if we shaved our heads, we'd look like weasels!
|
|
|
|
|
Unfortunately the more steps we put in place of this type the more hassle it will be for regular members, and the more screens the lazy people will simply ignore. People can be ingenious at ignoring instructions when they are determined to be lazy.
cheers,
Chris Maunder
|
|
|
|
|
General 
News 
Suggestion 
Question 
Bug 
Answer 
Joke 
Praise 
Rant 
Admin 
Submit an article or tip
