Forum communication

[Jabberwocky]

I wish you the best of luck, but this is not the first time we're seeing someone trying something like this - there kinda seems to be a multi-stage process that all aspiring contributors are going through, this being among the first 3 stages

And yeah, I also went through it, too.

Keep in mind that our way of interacting with people and "managing" things is not necessarily "ideal" for the project, but it happens to work for us, and is tolerated by others (another important point)

This is no "must". Just say if you don't like it and I shut up and won't even try.

[Jabberwocky]

The important bit is implementing a strategy to motivate people to help with this - so far, this has not been particularly popular.

I think part of the problem, and I'm speaking as a relatively new user now, is that there doesn't seem to be this one place where all information exists. There's the webpage, there's the forum, there's the wiki. Now, what determines where I go is what information I'm seeking. If I end up going mostly to the webpage only to download new aircraft then I'll likely bookmark that download page, not because I don't want to see the homepage but because the forum is where a lot of the "life" is taking place. So asking for testers on the webpage is probably going to be missed by many that have already passed that stage (i.e. found the webpage, downloaded the app and some planes and then started flying). And in my experience it's difficult to create an impact on forums simply because of the user interface. It's very easy to miss things of more importance than others, because they all look the same on the page. And the wiki page to me at least is a resource when looking to solve a problem or learn something.

So, the short version is that many users are likely completely unaware that testers are needed for various parts of the project.

But you go where the life is, the forum. So, there is a start point. The appearance of "important" posts is something worth to discuss, but I'm sure, something could be done with that. The other part is, not only testers but a lot of people are needed. So somewhere a place for new threads what it is that is accute needed would be helpful. Which of course means, it also needs to be maintained but that can't be too wild.

[Hooray]

Regarding your previous message:
As said elsewhere, I don't claim that I know it all, everybody here needs to find something that works for them - I know that I have found an approach that works fairly well for me, and the people I am dealing with (including newcomers) - but I am fully aware that there are others, including very seasoned contributors, who disagree with my methods, too. To each his/her own I guess. I am just as much a random user as you are, no matter what I say, it should have no repercussions for your own FG related plans - gather some feedback, and then make up your own mind. What you describe sounds great, and FG would be a better place if you should find a way to even just implement a fraction of your ideas. But it's taken us years to arrive at the current situation, and it "works" - mainly for contributors. End users are simply not a priority, because they're consuming more resources than they're contributing - which makes them less relevant to the overall project admittedly, as unfortunate as it may sound, but in this sense we're not much different from any commerrcial entity, where revenue and profits matter to keep the company alive (and to prioritize development) - for us, keeping FlightGear alive is mostly a matter of attracting potential contributors so that FG can grow over time, we don't as much need end-users using the final product (and taking up time requesting support), as much as we need contributors and developers willing to support and further the project.

And in fact, you nailed it when you said earlier something along the lines of: "Sorry, I don't have time currently, sorry that I have to work to make a living"

This applies to 99% of the people involved in FlightGear most of the time, so we need to prioritize inevitably - and obviously, we prefer spending our time where the RoR is greater (which is typically not end-users).

This isn't intended to sound negative, but this is something that most contributors will agree with - if you haven't yet, I suggest to read the "how the project works" thread: viewtopic.php?f=42&t=15267

[Thorsten]

Well, not everyone is willing or able to work with a debugger, so the logical consequence is, avoiding to ask questions about whether something is a user problem (wrong button, wrong settings) or an error. Which is totally okay, if FlightGear is intended to run anyway only for a little group of enthusiasts. If not, the question remains, how to inform and get background information about plane and program behavior without mentioning that kind of problems to avoid being jumped for "you want help, so you have to produce all the debugger information and otherwise I call you rude."

P.S. And if you decide now, to kick me from the board for pointing out a basic communication problem, so be it.

To comment or not to comment...

So, Jabberwocky here makes the allegation that I 'jumped at him' and told him he has to produce 'all the debugger information' otherwise he'd be called 'rude'.

Let's take a look at what I actually wrote:

Thorsten:

I've never seen anything like this in recent years. Is it reproducible? Did you literally land on the cloud cover (What type - 2d or 3d ? If 3d. they don't have a well-defined flat surface, so what does that statement mean?) or just in the vicinity? If you go back with the ufo and monitor altitude-agl, do you see anything odd?

There's a bunch of question here aiming at giving me the information I need. Reproducibility (very important, if I can observe it myself, chances of a fix increase tenfold). Since 'landing on clouds' was mentioned - FG uses 4 different cloud rendering strategies. I know it is theoretically possible to land on clouds if enable-hot is set to true, and I am responsible for two of these cloud types - so I need to know what cloud type. I need to know whether it is a plane problem or a scenery problem, so I asked to go back with the ufo.

Oops, no request for running a debugger here. All things a newbie can do.

More from my side:

Thorsten:

The screenshot indicates that the scenery simply isn't loaded - that does happen occasionally when the tile manager chokes for some reason and a manual scenery reload (see the rendering menu) usually fixes this - but you woudn't have a solid surface then. To crash that way, scenery would have to be loaded but not displayed. So was the visibility set to extremely foggy, is there anything in the rendering settings that might explain this?

Some preliminary analysis - a tip what to do if scenery isn't loaded. More questions having to do with the rendering settings and why we don't see scenery, trying to help me understand what I'm seeing in the screenshot.

Oops, still no request to run a debugger. Which would incidentially completely pointless, because we're not dealing with a FG crash, so we have a running instance and can do all tests in-situ.

Summarizing what I said:

Thorsten:

Are we dealing with two phenomena here (landing on clouds, scenery not being visible), or one and the same?
Above all, we need information on this, systematics, reproducibility - a single screenshot isn't overly illuminating.

So, not only do I ask for specific information, I also partially explain why I need it.

Here comes the response:

Jabberwocky:

Same effect. And to reword my earlier post "I suspect scenery" as in "scenery not loaded". Not as in "scenery itself has a problem".

Um, yeah. That's all. Seriously Jabberwocky who wants to explain to the FG project how communication needs to be organized considers this line a reasonable reply to my post.

Complete waste of my time. I don't want his judgement on whether the effect is the same (because he doesn't know any FG internals), I want the information to make the judgement myself. So despite taking the time to explain exactly what I need to know, I get nothing (except the later allegation that I'd have asked him to run a debugger, which is demonstrably a lie).

I decide to waste some more time to try to get something reasonable and try to point out why Jabberwocky shouldn't make any diagnostics himself but rather leave it to people who know FG internals:

Thorsten:

Same effect.

Why? On the screenshot you're close to the ground, so the scenario is consistent with you crashing into something that's really there, but for some reason not rendered. In the description of the other incident, you're 10.000 ft above Hong Kong (which is at sea level) landing on something that's not really there, but solid in any case.

And to reword my earlier post "I suspect scenery" as in "scenery not loaded". Not as in "scenery itself has a problem".

Doesn't make any sense, if the scenery is not loaded, the ground cache isn't filled, so there's nothing to make you crash into anything. Collision detection with the ground can only be done if scenery is loaded (I've actually tried that).

Oops - still no debugger mentioned anywhere.

And, after Jabberwocky wasting two posts worth of my time, we come to the jumping at part:

Thorsten:

But well... if I try to explain to you that this needs more information and you feel able to write just a single line, then that's the end of it. I don't see the issue. Just please don't expect anyone to fix this, with the level of information available that's not actionable.

That's technically a conditional statement. If there is no better information, it won't get fixed. It's a statement of fact (and everyone who has ever done any debugging will confirm that).

One can only come to the conclusion that there's 'jumping at' it if acting out of a sense of entitlement - now that I have posted a screenshot, it's the duty of the others to fix this issue. How dare anyone ask me to do yet more??? So Jabberwocky sees this as 'kick all over the place' because of... precisely what? My wording really doesn't permit this interpretation. I didn't say 'shit', 'stupid' or any other of the words end users are frequently so fond of.

The entitlement hypothesis is also supported by (fast forward a few posts):

Jabberwocky:

What I don't appreciate are "warnings". Warnings make users look for other flightsims.

So, I get threatened with users going to a different flightsim. Note the mental inversion: I have to be grateful for Jabberwocky to use FG, so he feels I'll be sufficiently scared that he (or others) might go away. Not he has to be grateful that he can use uncounted hundreds of hours of other people's and my work for free. That's a prime example of entitlement if I ever saw one.

Conclusion: Blame should go squarely where it belongs. Jabberwocky got an entirely doable list of requests for more information. He chose to supply none of the requested items, but instead to lie about being asked to run a debugger. He wasn't jumped at, but rather told that with the supplied information the issue isn't actionable. He chose not to take this as incentive to supply more information but to take offense. His sense of entitlement is very well supported by other evidence.

So before people fall for any of the many words about communication and such like, it's worth looking at the actual issue: Jabberwocky was never treated in a rude way and was never asked for information he could not provide, but he subsequently chose to lie about both points.

And that will be the end for me - Jabberwocky will go to my ignore list, and I expect an apology from his side. I don't deal with people who accuse me of things I have demonstrably not done.

[Hooray]

to be fair, I don't think he was deliberately lying - as I pointed out, he was probably referring to another thread, where we actually did discuss obtaining gdb backtraces, and which caused me to update the wiki accordingly - which kinda became a red herring subsequently. I do think that he's trying to contribute in a meaningful way, but maybe this is a matter of too many trees to see the forst

some of his other points are not far-fetched, even though he's obviously very ambitious for someone who's just been around for a few weeks here, and who's apparently still having to a hard to walking across the minefield that the FG community can be at times

For some reason, an increasing number of contributors are getting fed up with newcomers recently (myself included), and even some of the more experienced contributors are getting lost in lengthy debates that end up being pointless - maybe it really is a seasonal thing, i.e. the weather being to good to sit in front of the computer, so that the subconscious kicks in and lowers the threshold for frustration ? Dunno, but I can perfectly relate to it - and I am seeing an unprecedented number of posts like these, emphasizing how "impolite" we are (so there must be something to it).

On the other hand, who else is going to step up and handles these chores ?

[Thorsten]

Well, did anyone else say or imply this?

"you want help, so you have to produce all the debugger information and otherwise I call you rude."

I take back what I said if that can be shown, otherwise the point stands.

[Jabberwocky]

I quote Thorsten:

But well... if I try to explain to you that this needs more information and you feel able to write just a single line, then that's the end of it. I don't see the issue. Just please don't expect anyone to fix this, with the level of information available that's not actionable.

That was right after I agreed to his thought, it was probably a scenery not loaded, for what reasons ever. So this attack came out of the blue. But well, he had vented his frustrations here in this thread before, so I apologized for not having more information..

After that, Sanhozay, Hyde, ludomotico and someguy confirmed the problem and figured it out. All of them know a lot more about FG than I do. While discussing the problem (I was mostly out of it), Thorsten blessed in the subject of do planes crahs at a certain situation or not with lines like

No, they won't necessarily. Repeating myself: On a second try, I got stuck on something, however without crashing.

I invite you all to read the context in that thread. Sniding remarks don't help, denial doesn't help either. However, Sanhozy found a fix. But at this point, I was already also a little bit angry. So I wrote, with screen shot:

And another one landing that can't be according to Thorsten: 900 ft above Cairo

and got back:

Wherever did I claim that this 'can't be'? This is a friendly warning, I'm in this thread to help - if you can't be bothered to read what I write and feel you need to launch jibes my direction, you'll end up on my ignore list and can go looking for someone else to assist you.

Now, maybe it's just me, but I react very ugly on "warnings". I run another non-profit action that deals with far more nasty people than Thorsten probably can imagine. I have been "warned" and "threatened" with murder and take that literary. The warning not to assist me (after I didn't ask for help in the first place but got all the information needed from the first three posts) ranged on that scale as ridiculous.
Also in the same post:

Except there's no cloud seen anywhere in the screenshots and you're definitely not landing on any clouds.

Care to have a look under the thickening white stuff under the wheels? Care to tell on what I heated up my wheels so badly, they smoked?

So, fine, I made my offer to try something for FG. Thorsten reacts with the charme of a pouting girl, Hooray tells me it never works. So, my offer stands, if you decide to try, let me know, I am reachable over the board and via my website. But I will not apologize to Thorsten for Thorsten being rude. You don't have to do what I suggest. But if you decide to do something, I don't play too many games except computer games. No drama games. The ball is in your half now.

[Hooray]

lol, let's just cut it for now - we're all having too many construction sites dealing with b/s like that, just look at all the "bantering" going in in the "Replay Conversion" thread ...

[Jabberwocky]

I read that and on technical level, I can't even imagine how this would work.

[Jabberwocky]

Well well well ... after a while working with human behaviour, I guess, I can see where the thinking error is. Lets look at the first line, that makes it glaring obvious:

It's in a nutshell a question of community spirit - what values does a community subscribe to, what behaviour does it accept, how does it strive to do things. This is largely a conscious effort which needs to be maintained.

So, who maintains and therefore controls? Why break the spirit if not because you don't like where the spirit goes? And, in the further progress of your manifesto, you consider it "rude" to have to read where you got the intentions of others wrong or where you did something, lets say on the edge. But you don't consider it rude to throw principles like the equality of members over board, support banning of opinions that are contradicting yours and, that's in my book probably the rudest trick of all declaring others as second class. You tried it first class when there was the distinction between core and content developers, now you summon the same rabbit out of your hat with expert elvish speakers and beginners.
Of course there are beginners. You were a beginner too, only years earlier. Betginners have opinions, bring in experiences from other fields, bring new ideas. To block beginners by a concept that basically implements the idea "shut up beginners, we experts talk" and deny any new member a voice, you deny the project of the input from fresh blood and ensure it's way into oblivion. You gave the example: A lot of those Elvish communities died ... not because of lack of spirit but because encrusted self-proclaimed leaderships prevented them from adapting to changing challenges.

However, there is a difference between FG and an Elvish language community. FG calls for many kinds of knowledge. Pilot knowledge (obviously chronically underestimated, but the only way to figure whether the things developed work as they should), 3D knowledge (split into scenery, aircraft, other 3D models), system knowledge (as in autopilots, FDMs) and so on. There are no experts for Elvish language here. There are no THE experts because the fields of knowledge in this project are anyway too wide to be covered by one alone. So by this vastness of knowledge needed, we have experts for this and for that, but never for the whole. Which equalizes the situation and give newcomers a lot of room to fill the empty space. Fine, you are good with shaders, better than I will ever be. I admire that skill. But then, it is not where I try to build up my expertise. I am in FG less than a year and in the beginning, I couldn't even bring a plane up from the ground. Today I refurbish about four of them with JSB per month. Now, what will it be in a year? Who knows? IH-COL has build some nice sceneries over time. He leanrs permanently new tricks. Sure, at this moment, you maybe can challenge each of us single to develop a plane faster than you or a scenery. But can you take on both? Can you in a year? But if you only hesitated for a second right now, where is your justification to use bullying tactics to deny FG of this additional knowledge and manpower? There is no justification.
So, new people come up, new people focus on different fields of knowledge, new people do new things. That is how it is supposed to work. There is no protection to keep a project the size of FG as a private sandbox. It will die. And what a shame would that be!

J.

[Alant]

Anyone noticed that this topic has not been taken over by you know who ?

Just ignore him.

Alan

[Thorsten]

Isn't the ignore list function a blessing?

[Michat]

Who gives me a break?

I'll do.

Despite our discussion about The Space Shuttle subject, I still believe that The Space Program is an open wiki land where everybody is welcome to be included, of course your Orbit too. So I tend my hand to you in order to encourage you to include your work sections and so on in the program. Due that HerbyW changed SpaceShuttle name weeks ago in order to avoid problems with your project (fairplay), now his spacecraft is named Shuttle, you can use SpaceShuttle Wiki page and we can use Shuttle. In your favour I dind't redirect those pages in order to not make unsuable the SpaceShuttle page, If maybe you'll want to use it, as it needs some help since long time ago, having the appereance to be missed in time, as the result we both parts well know were uncomfortable. But no for more time.

I wish to apologizes for my terrible critic to you, (when I get below AGL) questioning your honor and honesty, just for a thing that [.......] for me is resolved now.

I'll have to accept that I crossed that line, didn't want to hurt you.
My apologizes and excuses cause I couldn't post before, cause I still get seasick sometimes.



Forum BB's communication is hard. In 2011 I started a Q&A demo site AGPL [url]FAQ you since 2011 http://flightgear.shapado.com/[/url] code can be adapted or federated ( I don't know) but is a good system to get better levels of accuracy in answers also with wiki generation-integration.

They are pile of amazing things we can do been closer to free (as smart) software community in order to improve our levels of communication-coordination.

I'm agree to open a list of problems LOP, a list of suggestion LOS, whatever names or categories it takes or pools needed, in order to indetify common sense objetives.

A priori I could identify some of them from my point of view.


Now I see a lot of [url]gobblins http://mediagoblin.org/[/url] here, turning around the cauldron. They want to drink the potion.https://goblinrefuge.com/mediagoblin/u/aepcam/m/gobbling-boy/

Cheers.