Forum Clutter - Students (and others) posting in this forum 3

[human909]

Hi

Maybe it has become worse. Or maybe I'm just getting older. But there seems to be an increasing number of student or very inadequately trained engineers posting in this forum. Occasionally such posts can tangent to useful discussion but most of the time it is just clutter. Kootk posted quite strongly on this topic recently in one of the many threads posted by a student or severely inadequately trained engineer.

IMO the solutions is in our hands. Either;

• REPORT the thread and rely on admin to remove it and/or;
• have a strong direct reply and a strong request that nobody else replies so the thread dies a natural death or;
• do nothing as a fix isn't needed.

At present many of these threads are kept alive but questions and answers that got in circles or by people who add to the replies telling them to post elsewhere. (I perpetuated this today.) I believe content could be improved if we all made a better effort to ignore such threads. The "Truss" thread I initially ignored as I wanted to let it die, then after multiple replies from others I perpetuated it by replying.

Any thoughts? A useful discussion? Or will this thread die quickly....

Personally I think a combination of the first two solutions could readily shut down poor quality threads. The second only works if people listen and agree that the thread is better off dead. I believe it would work a reasonable percentage of the time.

 

[GregLocock]

I’ve done stress analysis for 43 years. The number of 101 level errors I see here by the code following people makes me think a bit of gentle theory based discussion is not out of place.

 

[human909]

Sometimes we get aerospace/automotive/mechanical people responding that seem to miss the mark. But often they can add a different perspective. As @GregLocock has mentioned, us structural folk can be too code focussed