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Comments on Are we there yet?

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Are we there yet?

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Are we ready to let the world know about this site yet? What, if anything, do we still need to do or set up first?

I have created a bunch of help pages that are intended to give newcomers a good idea how to use the site, and what is expected of them. There is an infinite amount of information that could be provided. Do we have enough to go live?

Of course this site isn't a secret, and anyone can come here as it is, and we can't control who tells whom about it. I'm going to hold off my own efforts to make the site known out there until there is a consensus here that we're ready.

2020/6/12

It's now over 24 hours since this was asked, and there have been no answers. There has been one comment from a bystander suggesting that there should be something here when people first visit. That makes sense. I've already written one canonical question and answer, with more planned. Hopefully others will add some of their own.

At this point I'm going to start letting people know about this site. It will take a while for people to poke their heads in, and more canonical questions will be added in the mean time. I'll also make it clear that this site is new, and therefore doesn't have an existing volume of questions. That's a feature! Your question won't get drowned under a flood of others.

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General comments (3 comments)
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Hi there!

The on-topic page https://electrical.codidact.com/help/topics might need a bit of tweaking and discussion.

I think it is important that such a page attempts to be as specific as possible early on, so I quite like it and agree with most stuff there. But a few other things might need to be addressed:

  • "The physics behind how circuits and circuit components work" should probably be expanded to all physics involving electronic design - including things like magnetism, radio, optics etc etc.

  • Soldering, electronics assembly and ESD should explicitly be on-topic.

  • Electronic component identification. Potential hot potato. A lot of people find this interesting - do we want this & to what extent?

  • Repair questions. Definitely a hot potato that probably calls for a discussion thread of it's own. This needs to be made either explicitly on-topic or off-topic. Should we allow them or not? If allowing them, we need rules. What's required from the OP other than the question being researched & answerable? Basic electronics knowledge? Basic tools like solder iron and multimeter? A scope?

  • Similar to repair questions: DIY questions where someone is trouble-shooting/fiddling with the household mains voltage or the electronics in their car etc. On-topic or off-topic?

  • Electronics approval/certification/legislation (FCC/CE/UL etc approval) questions should probably be on-topic. Possibly also including electric environment questions such as climate testing, IP class, EX etc.

  • General programming questions that are not unique to embedded systems should be off-topic.

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General comments (5 comments)
General comments
Monica Cellio‭ wrote over 4 years ago

I'm not qualified to comment on the content of this, but a note on mechanics in case it affects the discussion: if you have types of questions that have fundamentally different requirements, you could consider creating a category for them. Photo created Gear Recommendations for this (yes you can ask these but you have to specify...), and Scientific Speculation has a category for more-rigorous questions with higher requirements on answers. Just FYI in case the approach helps on this site.

Olin Lathrop‭ wrote over 4 years ago

@Monica: Thanks, but I think we'll wait a bit on that. Creating lots of categories early makes the site look even more empty than with the single category we have now. We may eventually get there. Time will also help us see where splits make the most sense. Frankly, I think it was a mistake of Photography to create all those categories, at least for now. The place looks like a ghost town.

Olin Lathrop‭ wrote over 4 years ago

@Lundin: Some of what you ask for already existed. I also just added a few items. Repair questions are tricky to make on-topic. There should probably be a help page devoted to them, like there is for component ID questions. I'll work on that as I have time.

Monica Cellio‭ wrote over 4 years ago

I don't think sites want lots of categories either. Categories aren't tags. In designing them we were envisioning a site having maybe as many as 4 or 5 (Q&A, meta, blog, contests, maybe something else -- not necessarily all of those on any particular site).

Lundin‭ wrote over 4 years ago

Things like component identification or repair questions are probably not suitable categories, we should rather just make rules for how they should be asked, as I've now noticed was already done here: https://electrical.codidact.com/help/compid.