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Introduction, READ BEFORE POSTING

Welcome to the Codidact Electrical Engineering site.

Here are a few things you need to be aware of to result in a good experience for you and the other users of this site. All users are expected to understand these points, and will be treated accordingly. You should read this page before posting anything.

This is a Q&A site, not a forum

This may not sound like much of a distinction, but it is.

This site is based around someone asking a question, and multiple people answering it. There is no thread. There is no conversation or discussion. While those have their purpose, that's not what this site is about. If you are looking for chit-chat, this is the wrong place.

Answers are peer-reviewed

Anyone can answer a question. Some answers will be good, some not so. To sort out which is which, we vote on answers. Each user can vote an answer up, down, or leave it alone. This is how answers are rated by the crowd. Answers are shown in best to worst order. This order can change as more votes accumulate.

Remember, pages are not conversations, so answers can be re-ordered at any time without breaking anything.

Voting

Voting on answers is the fundamental mechanism that ensures quality.

If you know the subject and see a correct answer that does a good job of answering the question, upvote it. If someone went above and beyond to explain something, even if perhaps tangential to the question, it may be worth an upvote. If an answer helped you, you should probably upvote it.

If you're not sure whether something is correct, leave it for others to judge and don't vote it either way.

When you see something that is clearly wrong, downvote it. We also don't appreciate poorly written answers, lazy answers ("just do xxx" without explanation), link-only answers, and the like.

Remember that those writing answers are volunteers generally trying to help. Downvotes should be relatively rare. But when something is just plain wrong, excessively sloppy, advocating illegal action, or otherwise "bad", do the site a favor and downvote it.

Questions

We expect questions here to be well thought out, well written, with relevant background info, and to the point. Remember, this isn't a kaffeeklatsch, and we don't want chit-chat. We do want good questions that allow good answers to be written.

Writing good questions is a topic on its own, so we created a separate page for that here. Read it before asking your first question.

Questions are also rated by voters. If you consistently write poor questions, you may find yourself without the privilege of asking more questions.

Closed questions

Not all questions are ready to be answered. They may lack important information, be badly written, off topic, or otherwise not fit the site. Such questions are closed, which means the system won't let answers be written.

Questions can be re-opened after they are edited, if the problem has been fixed. If you wrote a question that got closed, pay special attention to the comments (see below), and address the issues raised in them.

Comments

There can be comments below each post (question or answer). Comments are only for providing feedback to the post author about something you think they should change.

The main use of comments is to ask for more information about a question. Since those writing a question don't know the answer, they may also not know what is relevant. If a question is unanswerable without some additional information, don't answer it. Ask for the additional information in a comment.

If you asked a question, and got a comment asking for more information, add the information to the question, don't bury it by replying with another comment.

Think of comments as the scaffolding and construction lines used to build posts. When all done, they should be, and often are, removed. Real content doesn't belong in comments. That's reserved for questions and answers.

Comments are not for answers to the question. Such "answers" are bad for the site for several reasons: Comments can be removed to keep things neat and tidy. Attempting to answer in a comment circumvents the peer-review process, and the closed-question mechanism.

If you build up a history of attempting to answer in comments, you may lose commenting privileges, or be thrown off the site altogether. We don't tolerate answers in comments.