I had been wondering about proposing the same idea for a rather long time.
I like it, specially about the point 2. Lately there has been a lot of
controversy
in the forums about users who feel discriminated for being novices.

Of course we will need stronger patrolling in such a new forum section to
make
sure users do not abuse of the newcomers, at least for a time. I'm faithful
that
most of the community members are not going to do that, but you should
always
be prepared for the worst.

I think the "sorry for being a newbie" type of post is more due to forums in
> general

being hostile than the wesnoth forum in particular... and I don't think we
> can change

the internet as a whole.


Sure we cannot change the Internet as a whole, but we can make our community
stand out from the rest of the Internet.

Just my opinion. Regards
-- Ignacio Morelle a.k.a. "Shadow Master/ShikadiLord"

On Wed, May 7, 2008 at 6:03 AM, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> From: David White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: dev-talk <[email protected]>
> Date: Tue, 06 May 2008 12:45:26 -0700
> Subject: [Wesnoth-dev] Wesnoth "newbie's" area
> 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
>
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