First, I didn’t know where to post this, so if there is a better place, please don’t hesitate to move it.
I was thinking about one possible improvement for this forum. When posting a question, there are many cases where the original poster (including me) doesn’t give hints about the accurate version. Which version of Kicad, which platform (mac, Linux, window and which version of it). And usually the first question he’s asked is what platform are you using, what version, etc…
I don’t know how difficult it would be, but what about making it mandatory for every new post to specify the environment? I’m aware some questions / suggestions don’t depend on the environment, but having a default menu selection like “please select one” or something like that, in this case,one would have to specifically select “environment independent”. And as long as you don’t actually choose something, you can’t post.
There is already a drop down menu for schematic / layout, etc… So a few more menus would make it easy for the poster, the versions would be accurately named, etc…
In the majority of the threads the KiCad version used is not very relevant. And when it is relevant, then whether the user adds his KiCad version or not helps in assessing his experience level with software.
All sorts of people with different backgrounds visit this forum and keeping it friendly and with a low threshold makes it better accessible to more people. If no version info is given, I start by assuming that the current stable version is used. If the question is about some “missing” feature that I know is implemented, then I also know an old KiCad version is used, which can be a trigger to request the version to be posted or just to suggest an upgrade.
There are quite a lot of topics concerning the nightlies. (V5.99), and this can be a bit confusing sometimes. V5.99 is being worked on for around 3 years now and hopefully be released “soon” as V6. There are however still quite a number of (almost all very small) issues with the nightlies being discovered daily and it will take some time before they quiet down. It does happen quite a lot that features are discussed that are only present in the nightlies (without mentioning the nightlies are being used). To the people using the nightlies this is quite obvious, but it can be confusing to people reading this forum, but who are not familiar with the nightlies.
For gitlab it’s quite different. Issues created there are mostly bug reports and feature requests, and entering the full version info (which is about 26 lines of text) is mandatory. There is just a relatively small group of people working actively on the source code, and they’re also volunteers. So the goal on github is to safeguard KiCad’s most valuable asset, and that is the time the developers put into it, and make it easy and pleasant for them to work efficient and effectively on improving KiCad.
Yeah, Foosel runs a pretty tight ship over on the OctoPrint forum (using the same engine as this forum). Over there if you don’t provide logs you don’t get support. Granted, you will be prompted (sometimes multiple times if necessary) to provide logs instead of simply ignored.
Another big apparent difference between KiCad and OctoPrint is I don’t think that Foosel has as big of a development team as we have here on KiCad. (And considering how small our development team is here, that is saying something.) I have seen a couple developer types on the forums there, but they seem to be mostly plugin-developers. I don’t know how much they contribute to the framework code.
Sometimes the information is needed, sometimes not. Full context info isn’t needed all that often. There are times I’ve asked for the info just to have the next poster answer the question without it. I think this falls squarely in the ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ category.
I agree with the OP. When you search for a topic you most likely want an answer for the current version. Soon we will be on V6 but searching may display answers written for V4 or V5.
To be effective you’d probably need to have this searchable in title fields. I once suggested someone start a new topic after bringing a zombie back to life only to have it pointed out that it was still relevant to the current situation. Again, damned if you do, damned if you don’t. As engineers we like to be organized though, right?
Edit. Auto closing threads in an anti-spam technique but I think it helps with keeping the topics current.
Hello!
I didn’t think about searching, but that would definitely be an argument in favor of setting this functionality. That said, maybe it’s because I’ve been too long in Japan where customers want to know everything about the development machine, windows version, etc… There is a utility to get that kind of information, I never remember where it is, but there is one. Anyway, never mind, it’s always easy to suggest and a lot more difficult to actually do the work.
