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Author Topic: New level of sharing knowledge & learning - OFPEC staff & community interested?  (Read 2108 times)

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Offline kju

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gday  :)

as we all know getting new people into editing and modding is not easy at all.

I think everyone agrees that ArmA I has caused a significant drop of editing members.
While ArmA II gave some strength back, it is by far not back to the levels from OFP.
While the rising complexity of editing, a higher user expectancy does make it harder as well,
we have also seen better tools and many different ways of contributions (guides, wiki, tutoring, etc).

Dev heaven is targeting experienced people and is a project support site.
Forums like OFPEC, BIF, Armaholic and others do play to some degree also the role to teach new people,
the primary function of a forum is a place for discussion and extensive feedback.
We have some new guides and tutorials, as well as gathering wikis to share knowledge,
we want to attempt an additional tool more targeted to educate any level of editing guy.


http://stackoverflow.com is a question and answer site for normal programming languages,
yet the system is also available to build new sites for different topics.

Our purpose would be to use it for people to ask simple questions and offer a as big as possible
community
to give answers and insights at very timely manner.

The concept appears to work very very well over at stackoverflow and many of the new spawn sites.
Unbelievable high amount of contribution and high level quality show this very clearly.
Another example is that google shows more and more the site when searching for relevant topics.

The core elements are

  • Strong search, rss, tags, filters to make the use as convenient and efficient as possible
  • A wiki system that allows collaboratively edited question and answers to achieve the best result as possible
  • Voting to make the most useful information available
  • Voting and badges to encourage users to contribute
  • No registration required for easy access, but accounts have several benefits

More details (very recommend to read):

About
FAQ


Now what is the plan?

The plan is to check if there is enough interest in the various existing communities in this approach,
and willingness to contribute to it, despite with question overlapping to a degree with each existing site.

The system can be used without fees in the beta phase; and if this new ArmA community project gets
successful to get BI pay the fee of 130$/month as a service for the community.

The target time to get this started (full power) is the release of OA (and it being at least a2 quality level).


Please share your thoughts, ideas and feedback on this project. Thanks a lot.  :clap:


PS: The visual appearance is something to get used to for sure. The design was made for programmers so far
as main target group, but it seems it can be adapted to a degree.
That said it appears to work very well like this.
« Last Edit: 29 Mar 2010, 21:18:29 by kju »

Offline savedbygrace

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Wait, so now you guys want to establish yet another site from which folks could learn? I honestly don't understand what is wrong with OFPEC. You guys who plan on undertaking something like this could just as easily frequent this site and be helpful to folks. I am not by any means here to discourage folks from learning but OFPEC has long been a beacon in this community that folks come and learn from. OFPEC hosts resources to a certain extent that stackoverflow.com would not and folks already are familiar with the name. Creating another site would only spread the knowledge out more and cause more confusion. If all of the folks who know anything about BIS titles would frequent OFPEC more often, the traffic would also increase considerably. If we who are willing to devote time to help others, combine our efforts rather than continue dividing, we are more likely to gain the audience that we once had with OFP. It is my opinion that you will not be able to do that with stackoverflow simply because folks will still come to OFPEC and some of the other outstanding resource sites to download the things that we all hosts. So why not keep the knowledge where folks will visit anyhow?

I can not speak for OFPEC, staff or members but I feel that your idea would only be another divisor in the community. I have learned more through OFPEC than any other site in the community from day one and I strongly feel that we(the community) need folks like you and all you other Dev heaven fellows here not there at stackoverflow. Long live OFPEC.."By the community For the community"

Offline kju

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I respect your opinion savedbygrace, but you may ask yourself why people like Spooner and Mandoble, like many
others, gave up on teaching people.
If you want to ignore that fact and the reasons for this, you will of course not understand the aim to use
different tools, in addition, to achieve sharing of knowledge.

Sorry to say, but to me this OFPEC or nothing talk is selfish and blinded by reality.
OFPEC is a great and the best site for in-depth mission review and people make use of that. If you ask me,
you should strengthen your efforts a lot more in this area (say promoting this specifically at other places).
OFPEC is a forum and therefore a place for discussion and more complex topics. This is very different to a Q&A site.
OFPEC is also a great resource site, while personally I see it more useful to combine all information in a wiki to
be able to allow anyone to update and improve the resources. While the BIKI is the place for technical
information, without question it is not very accessible.
So until there is a better wiki type site, the OFPEC website will remain the best place for it. That said OFPEC
also could consider to make their own wiki type project to transfer the resources into it.

As said I respect your view, yet our approach is to provide a mix of tools that suite the purpose best.

The simple Q&A system could work out very well to teach people as well as serve as tool to quickly acquire information.
« Last Edit: 30 Mar 2010, 08:36:53 by kju »

Offline Vigilante

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 :clap:

 :good:

Really, i love stackoverflows idea/paradigm .. or its combinations of it.. not only as a designer, but i see many profitable (in terms of time saved and learned stuff, not monetary) uses for it.

Many, many redundant questions floating all over the web get (sooner or later) 'collected' in this way and turn into something more useful.

I dont see it as 'yet another arma tutorial' site or smth .. i would rather like to see smth like it being made into some kind of browser plugin, like wikipedia or leo or smth..

its a tool, not really a site, and it gets better the more its used, which isnt really happening with a CMS site, where everything gets posted somewhere without really haveing any connection with related topics... which is ok for many things, but these little questions you 'just need to know right now' ... aint really accessible through searching of a CMS, except it has a stackoverflow kinda part or connection/redirect whatever..

« Last Edit: 30 Mar 2010, 11:55:37 by Vigilante »
a.k.a. PhilippRauch

check out my Addon Wiki http://www.vigilante-systems.webs.com (WIP and outdated :P)
http://www.youtube.com/user/vigilante-systems

Offline Zipper5

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Why did Spooner and/or Mandoble give up on teaching people, Q?

In regards to the decline in the modding community, I will agree that ArmA caused a decrease in modders. The game was not perfect on release, but there's also another reason for this - the game is much higher-tec than OFP was, and therefore takes a lot more skill and effort to create addons for.

People liked being able to make addons that looked good enough to suit OFP and would not take a huge amount of time and effort. This all changed in ArmA, demanding higher quality models, higher resolution textures, UV maps, normal maps, etc. and has only increased in ArmA II. Therefore a lot of the old modders of OFP were put off by the extra workload simply due to time constraints or unwillingness to change.

The amount of information available to those in the OFP times has not changed throughout the years. There is still a large amount of information and multiple tutorials about modding and such that only take a simple search of the most prominent community websites to find. While I would agree that having all of this in one place could make it easier for newbies, it will also take a lot of attention away from the already established repositories like OFPEC, the BI Forums, Armaholic, etc. which have been doing this for a while now.

The way that one has learned how to mod BIS' games up-til-now has been through their own searching and learning. Be it downloading tutorials, addons, missions, etc. and looking at them for themselves, or whatever they used. This was how it's been done in OFP, ArmA, and how it continues to be done in ArmA II. Having to put in the effort to find this builds a certain trait within the modder that helps them to learn better and be more serious about it, resulting in higher and higher quality modifications. To me it seems odd that you would want to do something but not want to put in the relatively minimal effort to learn how to do it.

And I'm sorry to say this, but it has to be said. After your last outburst I'm not sure I would be willing to support such a project if the head of it still thought and speaks so negatively of the community. It's an odd paradox to see the same person calling us ungrateful, lazy and stupid, to then see him come back to help these people. Nonetheless, I believe that people can change.

Offline savedbygrace

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I don't want this to get off topic but I don't feel that you should speak for others when expressing your dislikes of the community. SPOONER departed with grace from this community AFAIK, and since Mandoble is still around, it hardly seems as though he has stopped sharing his knowledge. I don't feel as though I have ignored anything, honestly. Perhaps I just view things differently?

Please don't misunderstand my post. I am not against other tools of learning, I am only against more division. When I see guys break out into segregated groups, I feel they have isolated the rest of the community and thus insert another wedge that splits the community apart. The successful community of OFP existed because the amount of sites that covered the game title were low. Which meant folks congregated to the same place, which brought all of that knowledge into a coalition effort to educate each other. All I see now are numerous sites trying to compete and modding groups who know more than the rest of us, elevating themselves in arrogance. If those guys truly wanted to help this community(those who actually want to learn), they would do what they enjoy doing in a way that helps others learn by their work. By this, I mean help those who make the effort by commenting their work so that when determined people break their project open to learn how it was done, it will be arranged in a way that they can understand it. By not doing this, they are essentially saying "everyone for themselves". That's not how communities grow.

But if stackoverflow consists of Q&A only with no discussion, it could very well be a welcomed addition to the community. But Q&A can never replace the personal touch and effort of step by step tutorials or mentoring discussion and I will always feel strongly that if this is something you enjoy and would like to see others enjoy it just as much, then you should be around to encourage them.

I don't know you Kju, heck I don't really know anyone here but I share a common interest with all of you. Isn't that the whole ideal though? A Q&A site would certainly prove useful and by all means have at it but I still think the best way to learn is through observing the work of others and asking them when you get stumped. That was the only real point I was trying to convey...not that your endeavor would not be beneficial.