Tell me about the board...

....please =)

Howdy, folks. I'm a long time professional embedded and java programmer who's looking for a good spot to hang out and maybe pick up a couple of tricks. What is the community on this board like? What is the ratio of gurus/noobs and signal/noise?? I'm not hear to judge anybody or anything - I'm just curious about the general atmosphere of the devshed forums and what kind of people frequent these boards. Vague questions, I realize, so maybe a better question is: Why do you come to the devshed forums?

Well, if you enjoy answering the same question over and over, the PHP board has a lot of users.

The senior members here are really cool, though, and some of them are actually quite smart. It's a pretty clean board, too. Most people follow the rules and the mods do a good job with those that don't.

Me though, I like solving other people's problems for them.

FuegoYGuaro, that depends on two factors - how long is 'long time' and how user friendly are you.

Among senior members, devshed has people (2 or 3 guys) who have been doing this longer then some junior members lived, but on the other hand we still have those junior members mentioned above.

User frienliness is a very important factor - you have to be able to cut some slack to people who make mistakes.

Can you learn a couple of tricks? May be. Depends how much of a professional you are, and how easily you accept other people's viewpoints.

Why do I, for example, come here? Simple - it is the biggest PHP community on the web.

the signal/noise ratio here is extremely low. too many morons with stupid questions and very few people with legitimate answers, and way too many people with crooked branches up their asses swinging censor sticks.

I don't think it's as bad here as Dingle does (just avoid the PHP forum. . . trawling around in there makes me want to pull my teeth out sometimes. . . Same for the other forums sometimes, too.)

I DON'T think there's a particularly vibrant java community here, for that you might check out www.javajunkies.org (though I'm not sure how vibrant that community is either. . )

I don't see too much going on in the Java-ish forum too often, but other forums make up for it (as mentioned - the PHP forum can be a real swamp sometimes, and HTML/JavaScript/CSS can get a little boggy from time to time).

I spend much of my time bouncing between the perl and Linux forums, and with some exceptions, I think they're pretty well aligned with what the "average" user would consider legit discussion / help as opposed to mind-numbing "answer-me-this-question-that's-been-
discussed-about-400-times-on-every
-website-and-forum-related-to-what-
I'm-doing-I'm-too-lazy-to-look-for-myself".

However, when you do get questions in the less active forums such as Algorithms or Java-ish, they tend to be better, more interesting ones.

As far as dingle... he just has a crooked branch up his *** (just kidding)
[edit]Whoops - funny that my singular word should by censored but not dingle's plural! [/edit]

Ya, the java forum is pretty quiet. I spend most of my time there now (got rather tired of "headers already sent" errors). The questions are generally broader in scope, although there are a few "how do I..." posts.

BWWHAHAHAHAHAH! Perhaps there should a PHP n00b (aka /dev/null) and guru forum. But I do think that something must be done otherwise the PHP forum will remain pretty boring. I love PHP but never hang there much for that reason.

Another thing. The PHP mailing list is GREAT but, personnaly, I can't stand the ~200 posts a day. A long chaotic series of posts of e-mails is just not the way to communicate in a meaninful way, IMO.

My 0.02$.