Wikipedia is a fantastic resource, just as shame so many editors are bastards.
AVRs are wonderful little microcontrollers – easy to learn and work with, very versatile and very cheap. Unfortunately, the AVR community are mostly bastards.
There seems to be a new kind of griefer on the internet – the academic griefer. Rather than troll in an obvious way, they play the long game and pray on the poor guy who is just getting started.
Witness, for example, the Wikipedia bastards. They operate in subtle ways – adding pointless [citation needed] tags. Deleting articles because they lack “notability” (the entry on Encase was deleted, despite it being the most popular computer forensics tool with hundreds of training courses being offered and hundreds of law enforcement agencies around the world using it). They have got the rules set in to their favour, and use them to clobber anyone who objects. They are clearly not interested in creating a useful repository of information, but rather in just pissing off other editors and slyly wrecking the whole affair.
AVR communities are a bit more blatant. Take this thread on AVR Freaks, a wretched hive of asshattery. The guy asks a fairly simple question, and rather than help him the respondents simply berate him. I can understand them being fed up answering the same questions over and over, but I only found that thread because I was having trouble with similar code and Google failed (turned out to be a serial port issue in the end, as I suspected since the code is trivial).
It is far from an isolated incident though. Knowing what was expected of me I started this thread. I laid out the situation in as much detail as I could. Again, Google and previous threads on AVR Freaks had failed. The first respondent (dbc) was remarkably helpful. I guess “theusch” must have been asleep because it took him a while to jump in with his troll post. Tut tut, fp is almost mandatory for trolls these days. Anyway, he couldn’t find any of the usual failings in my post so just made some up, asking about why I couldn’t get a ‘scope in my organisation (when did I say I was in an organisation?). Rather than finishing with a useful example of how to clean a bouncing signal up, he just asks a rhetorical question. As it happens I know what he was referring to, but god help anyone trying to get started with AVRs.
The DIY Audio Forums are just as bad. Apart from the generally crappy interface, they could at least offer a less hardcore forum for people who are trying to learn or ask more basic questions.
Even the /b/tards on 4chan are friendlier than these guys. As long as your post is not an epic fail they will usually at least entertain it.
Luckily, it’s not all doom and gloom. ~ ladyada’s tea party ~ is a friendly place to ask questions. HeadFi is good for general audio stuff too, even if it is focussed on headphones.
One Comment
Not only are they mostly trolling bastards… they are mostly American teenagers and students at half-ass unis doing mickey mouse degrees.
Do you think any expert worth their salt has the time for that joke shop?!
I was active on WP in the “early days” and quickly realised that it is an American thing… American culture, language, etiquette prevails… still some British stalwarts still row with them, and inevitably get banned.
The mistake most people make is to treat forums with respect! They get a bit territorial and fall into the trap of rowing with people who venerate the forum and use it as their main social hub – don’t waste your life on it!