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Is the IFixit community hostile to new users?

Hi,

I recently joined the IFixit community after discovering some of their toolkits in a shop.

I’m a 16 year old hobbyist, and I have recently put together my own PC.

I want to break into the community, and I thought that helping other people would be a fun way to gain some more experience. I will admit that I have made some bad posts, but I have redacted them after people have called me out. I also edited my solution to one user question when @mayer called me out.

However, I later found out that he downvoted every single one of my posts and told me I had no idea what I was doing and that I should not post on the forums.

Now think of me whatever you like, but that sort of hurt me, and gave me the impression that this is a hostile comminity. Now, I’m not trying to expose you @mayer or any of that stupid stuff.

In fact I greatly appreciate your contributions to the community. I just want to know if everybody is like this and if I should look elsewhere or if I should stay and try to learn more about computers.

I also want to mention that blowing up people’s inboxes with downvotes and insults is not a good way to grow the community.

Tbh I’m just a dumb teenager but I want to be less dumb, and this seems like a wonderful place to learn about all kinds of things. Thanks for reading my dumb, long-winded rant, and I hope that I can learn from this community so that I actually can know what I’m talking about.

Answer this question I have this problem too

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This question was migrated from https://www.ifixit.com/Answers.

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@chanute now would be a good time to jump into this discussion. It’s all about you and we need to hear your thoughts on this.

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@chanute ay what are you doing now? This is a discussion that was started by you. You really should consider some netiquette. Why are you accepting your own answer that did not contribute to the discussion? It is a great goal and good commitment but did it really solve the discussion? Think about it.....

Nobody on here really cares about points but we care about etiquette (the customary code of polite behavior in society or among members of a particular profession or group).

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@chanute no, not everybody. @mayer may just be a bit more cantankerous than usual. He is actual a pretty good guy and you can learn a lot from him. Unusual that he would use the voting system to correct you. He'll be a good mentor once you get to know him. Otherwise we all try to welcome new members and do not particular care about age, gender, race etc. As long as your answers are sound and solid and you can speak to them, you'll be okay. Nothing (well most of it anyway)on here is ever meant to be personal, harmful or bullying. The moderators will make sure of that. Downvotes in general are reserved for absolutely wrong, misleading or malicious answers. Upvotes are for either agreeing with the answer or just for simply saying "thanks for taking the time to answer" This is iFixit and not StackExchange. EVERYBODY is welcomed.

BTW your question, concern, will most likely end up in Meta where we discuss things that are not repair related.

https://meta.ifixit.com/

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A great answer, that I subscribe completely. However if I had just joined a community and raised some disappointment, rather than questioning an entire community potential hostility my first reaction would be trying to question my own first approach :)

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@arbaman agreed. Issue here is that our 16 year old friend will still have to develop and fine hone the skills of humility, social responsibilities,tact and tolerance. I am sure it'll work out with some guidance from us "old" ones. Kind of like senex meaning "the elder" or "old man" and therefore allegedly wiser and more experienced members of the society. So, I guess that makes us senators :-)

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I believe the answer you received from @oldturkey03 sums up pretty well the general approach of this forum where, from what I've experienced, new users are always welcomed and everybody's contribution is appreciated. However I take the liberty of adding a couple of personal considerations.

"Breaking into" anywhere, to use your own wording, whether physical or virtual place, is always a questionable approach. You're entering a world with real people who have given themselves rules of conduct to get the best out of it. Although it seems it got a bit lost along the way, most of us older guys have grown with a set of rules called netiquette that deal with participation to old newsgroups and most modern forums. Getting familiar with a bit of netiquette, which exists since before you were born, will help you understanding what I'm talking about.

I have had a look at your history, you subscribed yesterday, you answered 5 questions in a day on completely different items, getting right from the beginning into wrong and questionable answers for various reasons, not a tremendously great start, I can understand @mayer reaction. Learn from your mistakes, be humble and everything will be all right, welcome to iFixit forum.

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@arbaman - Good answer!

I would add, sit back and spend the time to read the questions and the answers for a while see how they are answered, focus on scoring what you think is correct.

Just like playing a piano or dancing it takes practice!

It took me a good 6 months before I started answering questions and I also stayed within what I knew best.

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Hi there, Chanute! We’re happy to have you in the community. I’m basically repeating what the other mods said, but as long as you’re being helpful, courteous, and following iFixit’s community guidelines, you’ll find this to be a rewarding experience. I’ll share you in on a little saying we have here at iFixit—nobody knows how to fix everything, but everyone knows how to fix something. So, stick to what you’re comfortable with, and you’ll be surprised at how much more you’ll learn along the way.

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Over the years on ifixit I believe I have been the most supportive and nurturing of all the moderators with young people. I attempted to explain why I down voted your answers and choose not to retract one. Your hubris really set me off.

So I will semi-retire as of today. Good Luck to All. It’s been a good ten years.

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I have to agree that you have been more than patient with all the young kids...much more so than I :>).

No need to retire Mayer, your contributions are invaluable...and besides, who else will keep tutoring the young wolves. If they aren't responsive to your prompts, why should the the rest of the community suffer from your withdrawal?

Besides, in this case, it looks like the OP got a better understanding of how things work here (or any forum, really) and it will be an invaluable lesson. Sometimes we remember the lessons from the "harshest" teachers the most.

Forget about the TPTB and the flyby contributors who can get you riled up, if you still take pleasure in helping others and interacting with the other AWESOME moderators here <grin>, then do it for yourself!!

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@refectio Thank you for your encouragement. I fully realize my disposition has been harsher lately (actually since last February). I fell down the stair and aggravated my already damaged spine. Since the the pain has been incredible and pushed my blood pressure way out of control. I got my back injected last week and will again get it shot up in a week. This has given me a little relief. I take a small amount of opioid for it but not half enough. The pain clouds my thinking and makes me nauseous. Went to my cardiologist this morning and he's upped my BP medication but told me I have to ask my pain doctor for enough to get it under control. I have and she won't. The government has come down so hard on pain medications that people that need it can't get it.

As Ronald Regan said: The Nine Most Terrifying Words

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhYJS80M...

If I get to harsh, please let me know.

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@mayer holler if you need any help. You have my contact. Anyhow nothing wrong with being a grumpy old man trust me, I know:-) Don’t worry about keeping you in check. That’s why we have all those great mods. I think us seniors just have to learn that we are dealing with a completely different mindset. No reason to quit. Just continue what you’ve been doing for almost a decade :-)

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@mayer Just a thought and a thank your for your welcome to this venue but please recognize that including expressions such as "Heavenly Father" is not conducive to rapport between participants in this medium. Personally I am an atheist and strongly believe pertaining to circumstances involving government and religion there should be absolutely no connection between the two. Your religious beliefs have no belonging in this arena and should not be referenced to regardless of your particular beliefs. Thanks for your contributions though, I am learning from them even at the ripe old age of 6o plus lol. :-)

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@propman sorry if I am not as politically correct as you. This is also the Meta site which is used more for internal communications, so it's on a more personal level here. Pastor Richard Mayer

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I’m not saying it’s something you should feel bad about it, but first impressions matter and they can hurt you if you introduce yourself poorly. You usually learn the hard way in the worst possible environment, but lucked out it happened here. You’re only 16 and you may not have known how good or bad first impressions matter in the long run - which is understandable. Learn from your error now and you’ll be set for life. I’m not going to pretend I also wasn’t rough at first because I was almost as bad, but you need to learn how unforgiving the real world is as soon as possible to avoid problems later in life.

Don’t be afraid of unknown territory, but you may be better off honing in on what you’re best at before going there - I found mine was electronics, but I’ve tried my hand in cars and trucks before with mixed results - usually doing better with Japanese then anything else. This is primarily because the major manufacturers (Toyota and Honda) don’t make major changes between major releases like say, you find with European models. Even if you aren’t sure about one thing, chances are you can go for something you know since they generally stick with proven technology.

From the answers I seen (may be revised), you didn’t really do a good job and I’m glad you acknowledged that. Part of it from what I see is that your first answers as a whole were not great and that may have set off something that triggered the bad first impressions level. We’re generally pretty forgiving of a rocky start here as you found out, but starting out that way doesn’t do you any favors.

Going forward what you need to do is develop your own way of answering questions that’s unique to you and focus in on honing that in. If you can start here and get it right, you’ll do really good in the real world where there are generally no second chances.

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Well with all due respect, asking your support team to fix obvious errors when replying to a query and including such terms as "ifixit", "TV" et al as being reported as spelling errors and receiving the reply from your support team that it it is my choice of net browsers and their spell checking options is quite hypercritical imho. Your code, interpreted by my browser that is the bottom line pertaining to this problem as far as I am concerned. The problem is not with my browser, it is your poor choice of how to implement interaction between your users and your site. Having to constantly interrupt my train of thought due to the interruptions caused by your inadequate interface does no justice to my replying abilities or enhances my options to coherently reply to a participants enquiries. You have definitely take the "I" in Ifixit and thrust the resolution of upon any spelling issues upon any user undertaking participation in any text interaction on YOUR website. Why as participants should we be required to either disable our spell checkers, or add common phrases to our brower's dictionaries or install any potential add-ons to rectify the this problem, as recommended by your support is beyond my understanding? Imho, you provide inadequate editing facilities. Not really interested in any BS excuses such as I received from your support department when I raised this issue before. It is not, I repeat, not my browser that is issuing the original code to be processed. Fix it please. If you can't, at least have the common curtsy of acknowledging the problem is at your end of things rather than putting the onus on your participants.

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@propman I am a bit slow and not as smart as most people on here. I am trying to figure out where your answer fits in with this discussion. Can you help me to understand this?

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@propman I built the code that you're frustrated with, and I can honestly tell you that we did not build in a spellchecker. (I would remember!) It's certainly possible that there's a configuration issue with our site and your browser, but this is the first I've heard of it. Would you mind emailing details to kristen at ifixit and we'll see if we can track it down?

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Chanute will be eternally grateful.