FAQ Sticky?

damnation

Hi,
After being on this forum now for some years I notice that there are certain questions that come up daily/weekly. While many of them are explained in the Documentation, some people just come straight to the forum. Hence, would it make sense to pin a post with the most frequently asked questions saying something "FAQ - Read before opening a thread"?
If you think that is a good idea, what are the common questions in your opinion?

dstillman

The Getting Help page already includes links to the FAQ page and the knowledge base index, as well as various other troubleshooting pages. I don't think we need to add an additional thing for people to read, and I don't think a thread is the right format, but we should certainly add a link to Getting Help from the New Discussion page to make sure people have seen that guidance. We do want people to have a chance to find answers quickly themselves, but ultimately many people won't read those materials, and we don't want people to spend too much reading or searching before posting when we can answer questions very quickly.

Other than a link to Getting Help, one technical solution here might be to do something similar to what GitHub is now doing when you create issues and show suggested KB articles when typing a thread title (or body, even). It would take some work to rig that up, but it might be worth it.

(As a side note, I've just added collections_containing_an_item to the FAQ, and there might be one or two others that would make sense there. There are probably also some KB articles that haven't been tagged appropriately to show up in the index.)

bwiernik

While making sure folks can access discover useful information is certainly great (I like the idea of GitHub-like recommended documentation pages on the New Discussion screen). I’m not really bothered by people starting new threads that have answers available in the documentation—those are the easiest ones to respond to quickly.