I think all of us can agree that we’ve seen a lot of posts and replies going around here that really have no right to exist: posts that contribute absolutely nothing to discussion, posts which are totally off topic from what other people are trying to discuss, posts which have been repeated hundreds of times, like “Is Roblox good” or “What do you like or not like about X [insert generic topic, like “development”]”.
I think we as a community need to set a higher standard for the kinds of posts which are and are not acceptable here, and maybe introduce a rule of conservative posting.
Basically, the principle of conservative posting is this: Only post when you have something important to say.
Here are some examples:
- Someone creates a post discussing a part of development that you are not familiar with, like maybe a discussion about when to use object oriented programming when writing code for a game.
What you shouldn’t do: “Hey I don’t know what object oriented programming is but it sounds cool. I am learning programming.”
What you should do: If you are interested in the topic being discussed but don’t have background knowledge about it, then look it up! You are pretty likely to find some leads or answers about the topic either here on the devforums, on the devhub, or on google. When you’ve put some effort into researching the topic but are having trouble, then you can make a reply saying “hey I’ve looked up X and I found out about Y, can someone explain to me why so is so?”
- You are bored and want to socialize with other developers on the devforums.
What you shouldn’t do: Create a generic discussion post asking a really open ended question that you have little interest in discussion yourself. I hate to call out certain people, but one post that has seen a lot of activity even recently is “What is your longest script”, where the author wrote a single sentence in the body of the post, and never replied to ANY of the discussion that followed from the post. Don’t make a post if you don’t care to discuss with the respondents!
What you should do: If you don’t have anything specific you want to discuss that hasn’t already been posted, then what you should do is browse through the existing posts in Development Discussion, find a post that interests you, and then leave your own thoughts or respond to other peoples’ thoughts. Then, this way we can facilitate and grow the discussion.
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I also want to comment on the quality of the open ended posts like “What is your longest script” which do not technically violate any rules, but also generate absolutely zero meaningful conversation. I just scrolled through that post and looked at the replies, and 99% of the responses were directly to the original post, and almost nobody was replying to replies (aka discussion). If you make a really short post, you will get really short answers, and short answers are the worst for generating engaging conversation. For these kinds of surveys where you are simply looking for some statistic about other developers, then creating a poll in the body of the post is a much better option.
