Unashamedly OT ... This forum is SH#T

This place has finally hit rock bottom … www.OpenGL.com used to be a place of learning. That, sadly, no longer is the case.

Once upon a time I could get a reasonable answer to a reasonable question. Not anymore. Too many posters in here are far too anal to post a sensible answer to anything. It’s sad. Really sad.

Maybe the answer is to ban everyone under the age of 25, or something, from posting - maybe then the respondents would give half decent answers to an off topic question.

The bigheaded people trying to answer a simple question with patronising answers should be banned. As it is, someone that tries to belittle someone else for trying to ask a reasonable question should be removed from this forum. I’ve never seen such an elitist bunch of morons trying to put others down on any other web site ever. That says an awful lot about the arrogance in here.

If someone is unable to answer a question then maybe they should just keep quiet – not patronise someone for asking a wrong question.

I originally came here to learn about OpenGL … but it seems that most of the ‘experts’ are not able to answer simple questions, let alone answer complex questions. I understand that there are two forums, advanced and beginners. But that is no excuse to put someone down, and encourage them not to use OpenGL.

Maybe this is an exceptional view, who knows. BUT the entire point of online forums (I think) is to help and encourage people to learn. When people are put down for asking a question in the wrong forum, they should be directed to the right forum, nothing more. It’s about time the arrogance stopped. It’s sad, and it’s childish.

[This message has been edited by Shag (edited 03-22-2002).]

I agree that there is a lot of this happening:

Person 1: “How do I do (insert question here)?”

Person 2: “You suck, that’s not advanced”

Person 1: “OK, but how do I do it?”

Person 3: “Here’s how you can find out how to do it”

I think everything would be fine if we just skipped the Person 2 part. Except for the forum being flooded with mostly OT questions. Which isn’t that bad, because it’s usually somewhat easy to pick them out, and even if you accidentally read one, you aren’t under some curse that forces you to reply or anything.

Maybe the answer is to ban everyone under the age of 25, or something, from posting - maybe then the respondents would give half decent answers to an off topic question.

The problem with that is that then many knowledgable forum users would be unable to post, including Matt from nVidia. And I would be banned too, so I wouldn’t like that too much. Age does not necessarily equal maturity or knowledge.

I don’t know if there is a solution to this, other than some form of moderation.

j

Originally posted by Shag:
This place has finally hit rock bottom <a bunch of stuff snipped> It’s about time the arrogance stopped. It’s sad, and it’s childish.

Exactly. And I thought I was the only one who noticed.

[This message has been edited by painterb (edited 03-21-2002).]

shag,

I have to admit, I haven’t seen this occur, but I don’t read every thread. I do occasionally (accidentally) step into a thread that’s clearly not “advanced”, but I just hit the back button and move on.

I think this forum still serves a great purpose, and I enjoy participating in it. I hope that a) you’re not too sensitive about the rudeness of others and b) you’re careful to post questions in the most appropriate forum. In either case, I hope I haven’t offended.

Thanks -
Cass

Originally posted by Shag:
Maybe the answer is to ban everyone under the age of 25, or something, from posting

That doesn’t sound like a good idea; I’m well under your proposed limit.

Age and maturity are correlated, and there’s even some causation in there too. However, there are data points all over the place on that scatter plot.

  • Matt

i lay a part of the blame on www.opengl.org they should have other forum types (yes i know there was a news item a little while ago about other forums to be added perhaps - any news?) for me non opengl stuff is ok,
*perhaps have a limit of say 100posts before someones allowed to post in the advanced forum (elitist most definitly

I have no problems with OT posts, if the person writes it in the topic. Then everybody could decide to read it or not.

Also, OT posts make sense here. A few days ago I had a math problem which was not directly OpenGL related. But it made sense to post it here because here are a lot of people writing technical applications. And I got the answer I was looking for.

But the OT posts should’nt get the majority…

Maybe if the forum gets new types, they could add an OT forum?

Just my 2 cents…

Kilam.

Kilam, your OT post about the inertia thingy was still kinda advanced whereas questions like “how do I enable lighting in OpenGL” really do not belong to advanced forum.

Also, OT posts make sense here. A few days ago I had a math problem which was not directly OpenGL related. But it made sense to post it here because here are a lot of people writing technical applications. And I got the answer I was looking for.

for non opengl specific forums there still gamedev forum . the net is full of cool coding sites even for opengl :slight_smile:

[This message has been edited by haust (edited 03-22-2002).]

Originally posted by haust:
for non opengl specific forums there still gamedev forum . the net is full of cool coding sites even for opengl

Yes, but I know that here are some people who program on CAD applications as I do. And I thought they could help me with that problem, which is CAD related.

niko:
What about the following:
Some of the people here in the board are made to moderators. People, who have many posts and who have advanced knowledge. You should not get automatically moderator after posting enough articles. When they see an article which is beginners, they could move it to the beginners forum.

Kilam.

[This message has been edited by Kilam Malik (edited 03-22-2002).]

Christ, all I did was inform someone that his AGP question was not welcome here!

We should all be united on this - even the people who post beginners questions.
There’s a place for everything, and everything in its place.
When I export a model from max in, say, vrml, I put it in the vrml directory. When I save a word document, I put in “My Documents”.
Call me old fashioned, but if someone started putting word documents in my vrml directory, I’d get annoyed - and I would inform the culprit of what I consider their mistake.
It’s the same with this forum.
What I can’t (under)stand is when other people start legitimising beginners questions in an advanced forum TO THE BEGINNERS - it doesn’t help the forum, which is all that counts.
It’s not the insults that cause the harm - you should understand that.
That is my opinion. I’m fed up with people bringing up the same tired old arguments, and filling the forum with more useless rubbish.

I think a good solution would be to have a technical moderator, let’s explain : a moderator who has some OGL skills, so who can move messages to beginner forums (and vice versa) and understand which messages are OT.

Another good choice whould be to have one moderator who adds an [OT] symbol in the message subject if he feels the message is OT.

Ok, I know this one isn’t a “politically correct” solution, but letting everyone being able to post on every forum (registering is a matter of seconds) lead the forum to get filled with OT questions (and sometimes wrong answers).

Just my 2 cents.

rIO.sK

The problem is that we have separate forums for beginners and advanced user, which is bad. It just has the effect that newbies get helped by newbies when they really would need to get helped by someone with more experience. Many of the beginners have found that it’s easier to get a good answer in the advanced forum even though their question isn’t advanced. I don’t think we should split us as beginners and advanced users.

Btw, what happend to those forums that were supposed to be added?

the problem of this forum is the presence of NVIDIA employees.

Why?

it is a paradox but it is the true.

Infact It should be a good thing, because it could be an opportunity to learn from one of best opengl drivers maker.

but It doesn’t happen, because their intention is to PROTECT Nvidia mark not to divulgate their knowledge (oh yes sometime they simulate).

How?

they apply a fine strategy. They drive this forum answering with laconic words marking Good and bad posters. Yes you are good and I respond you…no you are not you don’t merit my attention.

There isn’t any idea of community in this forum, it has been corrupted .

Solution : moving on other FREE forum and newsgroups.

Originally posted by Humus:
[b]The problem is that we have separate forums for beginners and advanced user, which is bad. It just has the effect that newbies get helped by newbies when they really would need to get helped by someone with more experience. Many of the beginners have found that it’s easier to get a good answer in the advanced forum even though their question isn’t advanced. I don’t think we should split us as beginners and advanced users.

Btw, what happend to those forums that were supposed to be added?[/b]

I agree with Humus. In the discussion about the new forums where the problem, that we would need beginners->lighting, beginners->textures etc. and also the same in advanced. So why not throw this together and make forums called “lighting” “textures” “pixel shaders”. Also, make a starting page, where you could see the last 20 posts over all forums. I have seen that in a german message board which has about 50 sub-forums. They also use UBB (www.cad.de). So you don’t have to look in each forum if you want to get all new articles.

Kilam.

While I generally agree that something about the organization of this place is wrong, I want to add that I’d never post anything OpenGL related to a C programming forum, or to a general gaming forum. And for a good reason, I believe.

OT-Flood -> not good
Of course you have to know what OpenGL is to be able to recognize OT stuff. The relevant information can be gleamed from the first 18 pages of the spec. Is that asking too much?

Originally posted by ND:
the problem of this forum is the presence of NVIDIA employees.

I absolutely disagree. The fact tha both NVIDIA and ATI employees are participating these forums is a big win for others and hopefully for them too.

(In these forums) I don’t care if someone is “good one” or “bad one” or anything else. For me teh qualification counts, and I must say that there are many people here who know what they are talking about, whether they are NVIDIA or ATI or whatever employees doesn’t matter.

As far as OT posts go - too many of them can kill this forum, if you want an example take a look at comp.graphics.api.opengl - few years ago it used to be a very cool NG and it rocked, now you only see loads of OT questions and only few people(almost can count them on my fingers) who make good contributions to the NG.

I think the “search forums” button should be much bigger - since many people (esp beginners) don’t even bother to search on google, not speaking of searching the forums - and this sucks IMO.

I don’t think that these forums suck, they are still the best place to get an answer to an advanced question I know and from time to time some quite interesting discussions are going on here on the advanced board.

Just my 0.02€
-Lev

Originally posted by ND:
[b]the problem of this forum is the presence of NVIDIA employees.

Why?

it is a paradox but it is the true.

Infact It should be a good thing, because it could be an opportunity to learn from one of best opengl drivers maker.

but It doesn’t happen, because their intention is to PROTECT Nvidia mark not to divulgate their knowledge (oh yes sometime they simulate).

How?

they apply a fine strategy. They drive this forum answering with laconic words marking Good and bad posters. Yes you are good and I respond you…no you are not you don’t merit my attention.

There isn’t any idea of community in this forum, it has been corrupted .

Solution : moving on other FREE forum and newsgroups.

[/b]

This is maybe one of the most stupid things I’ve ever read here. Even wildeyedboy… can not compete with you…

Originally posted by martin_marinov:
This is maybe one of the most stupid things I’ve ever read here.

maybe it is …for your stupid mind.

but I’m free to say this.