Suggestion: Mentors
 

There are a vast number of skilled coders and designers here, who dedicate their time to making hacks, styles etc for the good of the whole vb community.3

There are many more users who silently appreciate these hacks and love the coders/designers for them.

Sometimes the creators feel like they, and their skills, time and effort are unappreciated on here, due to the nature of the site, where many users just come, download and disappear .:)

Sometimes the users get frustrated because they feel the creators are on another planet where they speak a special language about class functions, pixels and queries etc.

There is another small group on here, users who would like to learn how to code or design for themselves, but get frustrated and eventually give up, merely expending their own time and the peoples who try to help them.

My suggestion is that users who want to learn be assigned a mentor, an experienced person on here who would be able to easily help them with the newbie questions that will inevitably be asked.

In this way the mentors will feel very much appreciated, having an understudy who looks up to them; and will also learn how to speak more simply so that a user can understand them :)

Good idea/Bad idea/A load of bollocks?

This is an excellent idea, and something that I have been trying to start.

However, unless there are people willing and able to mentor then it is going to be a non starter.

I'm pretty sure many people would be both interested and flattered if approached by staff and offered a mentor position.

I think this could work. One of the problems I see with community help is, we can all do the job, but we may all do it in a different way. So multiple coders addressing one problem with one member could cause confusion.

If there were a way for a coder to address a person one on one so that the thought process and explaination stay on the same wave lenght, it could be helpful.

Of course we can't all be eveything to everyone, so threads may need to be handed off now and them.

Anyway, good idea. I bet many would kick in. The only negetive that I see is some folks just won't be able to code and we don't want to offend anyone.

You could use Threads/PM/Messenger. I thiink the channels of communication already exist should a system be setup and managed nicely!


And I guess you'd just have to be brutally honest with those who are incapable of learning :)

Hmm. There's a lot of potential with a mentor. You can do it individually or by group; with group members can meet up in chat as a possibility.

Nice proposal. :)

I was thinking a hack to manage it, go figure. Yeah, those things would work. People could meet up and schedule times together in threads.

It would certainly bring people closer together!

edit: /me is a little newbie and needs one :(

Pick a forum, post a question and link us. Let's see what happens.

noppid can be my mentor. :cross-eyed: