I think that it's fairly clear that many new users of Wesnoth, though they love the game, feel somewhat intimidated by the Wesnoth community. An abundance of posts on the forums that are from new players begin with lines like "I'm sorry this is a stupid question", "Please don't shoot me down for this", and so forth.
I think this is unfortunate. Wesnoth is an avenue where many users of closed operating systems such as Windows and MacOSX may be exposed to users of open operating systems such as Linux. It is unfortunate that as a whole we may come off as being somewhat arrogant and intimidating. Of course, our current approach is somewhat necessary. We can't waste all our time answering the same questions over and over, or explaining why the same idea is infeasible over and over. Recently an idea was floated on the forums that I think is rather good. >From http://forum.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=21274 : My first suggestion would be a specific beginners section in the forum where new players could go to ask "stupid" questions without stigma or the inevitable comments from the elite players, it might attract and retain the casual players. Just an idea. By having a separate forum section marked "beginners" or "newbies" we'd be able to do a few things: (1) Reinforce to new players that it is okay to post there. (2) Reinforce to experienced players that questions or posts there are from new users. Experienced players who do not want to spend their time answering newbie questions need not participate there. (3) Set an expectation that posts in other forums be from people that know the basics. You have a place to post basic questions, don't pollute other forums with them. I propose creating a "Newbie's Section" as the very top Wesnoth forum. Any thoughts, suggestions, or objections? David _______________________________________________ Wesnoth-dev mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/wesnoth-dev
