New form for posting in new builds and planning.

[VEXICUS]

As we all know that there are many newcomers to the forum (especially in the new builds and planning section), who post either for checking their builds / asking for help from community members. Most of the time I have observed that most of them don't specify there country, budget, use case for the build. So it becomes time consuming for recommending a build.

 

Here's a suggestion that I have come up with. While making a post in new builds and planning section, a form must appear with all compulsory fields containing Topic, Budget, Location, Use and the content itself.

Topic and content are already present, just need to add location, budget and use on the same page.

 

I know that there's a guide by @Windspeed36, but people rarely bother to read the guide before posting.

[Fasauceome]

On the one hand, useful.

 

On the other hand, it would need a lot of tweaking to be practical to multicultural users. 

 

One existing problem: it is against forum rules to make a user share location, even as vague as country. (Similar rules with age, etc.)

 

Also vernacular is an issue. I've asked users what their use case is and they say "NZXT H500," having taken the term Use Case to mean Case Being Used

[VEXICUS]

1 minute ago, Fasauceome said:

 

 

One existing problem: it is against forum rules to make a user share location, even as vague as country. (Similar rules with age, etc.)

 

 

The reason being, prices of tech varies from country to country. 

[Fasauceome]

4 minutes ago, VEXICUS said:

The reason being, prices of tech varies from country to country. 

well yes I know why it's super advantageous, but the hurdle of anonymity and privacy will be the thing to get over. I always ask the region of purchase because the vast majority of users don't have any issue identifying that, but the privacy concerns are the reason for the aforementioned forum rule, hence why it can't be required

[VEXICUS]

4 minutes ago, Fasauceome said:

well yes I know why it's super advantageous, but the hurdle of anonymity and privacy will be the thing to get over. I always ask the region of purchase because the vast majority of users don't have any issue identifying that, but the privacy concerns are the reason for the aforementioned forum rule, hence why it can't be required

That rule isn't mentioned in the community standards though.

 

Also, how will giving away your country name affect anyone? That isn't considered as sharing location anyways.

[Fasauceome]

2 minutes ago, VEXICUS said:

Also, how will giving away your country name affect anyone? That isn't considered as sharing location anyways

Well, I've come across a few who are very resistant. 

 

Either from embarrassment or just feeling generally uncomfortable, the occasional user will feel very reticent to share that information. Mods have had to step in and remind people that we can't request users for their country.

[colonel_mortis]

It would be good, and I have thought about it before, but I had concluded that it wouldn't be possible. However, thinking about it now I may have a way to do it, so I will look into it a bit more to see if I can make that work.

8 hours ago, Fasauceome said:

One existing problem: it is against forum rules to make a user share location, even as vague as country. (Similar rules with age, etc.)

No it isn't.

[Fasauceome]

On 1/26/2020 at 6:06 AM, colonel_mortis said:

but I had concluded that it wouldn't be possible.

Odd, since the text fields of both the title and body are required, one would have thought that you could make versions of those but labeled for each criteria for the build info.

 

On 1/26/2020 at 6:06 AM, colonel_mortis said:

No it isn't

Could have sworn mods have had users back off after insisting for country of purchase, but maybe those are cases of just user comfort instead of explicit location?  

 

[colonel_mortis]

4 minutes ago, Fasauceome said:

Odd, since the text fields of both the title and body are required, one would have thought that you could make versions of those but labeled for each criteria for the build info.

Replacing some fields with others would break the existing code. Instead though, I think it should be possible to prefill the text box with a template that users can fill in, which should guide them towards the right information.

7 minutes ago, Fasauceome said:

Could have sworn mods have had users back off after insisting for country of purchase, but maybe those are cases of just user comfort instead of explicit location?

I'm not aware of any such cases, but I suspect it is more to do with people being really pushy than the fact that they want the country to be included.

[VEXICUS]

12 minutes ago, colonel_mortis said:

....

Another way of doing this will be, making a custom template only for posting in new builds and planning section. It should be possible to implement.

[minibois]

I still like the suggestion done a little while ago that it just fills in the post for you when you make one in that sub forum, so basically the pinned thread 'headers' appear in your post.

Something like this:

Spoiler

 

So instead of being presented a blank post screen, it fills in a couple sentences and implores the user to read the sticky if they are not sure what to say in each section

But I am not sure how 'possible' this is to implement.

 

When people post something in the Programming subforum, a blue banner appears on the top of the page informing users to use 'Code'-tags, so code is actually readable, but people still seem to be able to ignore it.

So to encourage new users to make a change, there really has to be a push to make them change their ways.

1 hour ago, Fasauceome said:

Could have sworn mods have had users back off after insisting for country of purchase, but maybe those are cases of just user comfort instead of explicit location?

Could have something to do with this rule?

Quote

Do not post personally identifiable information pertaining to anybody under the age of 16, including yourself, regardless of whether you have permission to do so.

Maybe the OP in question had their birthday listed on their profile.

Or maybe it just had to do with the fact that often this info is not fully needed to make suggestions (in my opinion).

Sure, you can make more personalized suggestions (like if the OP lives near a Microcenter, or if brand X over brand Y is cheaper in country Z), but usually in my opinion it's more the responsibility of the creator a thread to make something like that clear, should they find it relevant. What I mean by that, is if we share a PCPartPicker USA link and they see some part is substantially more expensive where they live, they could ask other users about this - possibly with a link to the store they're buying from - to see what is up with that. I have had that happen multiple times in the past and it posed little to no problems.

[Fasauceome]

1 hour ago, minibois said:

Or maybe it just had to do with the fact that often this info is not fully needed to make suggestions (in my opinion).

Sure, you can make more personalized suggestions (like if the OP lives near a Microcenter, or if brand X over brand Y is cheaper in country Z), but usually in my opinion it's more the responsibility of the creator a thread to make something like that clear, should they find it relevant. What I mean by that, is if we share a PCPartPicker USA link and they see some part is substantially more expensive where they live, they could ask other users about this - possibly with a link to the store they're buying from - to see what is up with that.

usually smart shoppers will compare, but believe me I've seen just as many threads where the user takes the first recommendation as gospel and ignores the rest, despite whatever country they're from. I notice this being a particularly large problem with Indian users, largely due to the fact that we are getting so many over the past year (due to the burgeoning infrastructure) and the very large discrepancy in PC market prices. While the suggestions for specific hardware, especially things like AMD GPUs, are usually quite good for US or European prices, there's often a large price discrepancy that would make an Indian parts list look very different. Unfortunately, a new user wouldn't really know that, and I'm sure you've seen the threads that say "I want to buy (x), is it good?" so if they hear that something performs well, it's on the menu, regardless of relative value.

[minibois]

On 1/26/2020 at 4:52 PM, Fasauceome said:

usually smart shoppers will compare, but believe me I've seen just as many threads where the user takes the first recommendation as gospel and ignores the rest, despite whatever country they're from. I notice this being a particularly large problem with Indian users, largely due to the fact that we are getting so many over the past year (due to the burgeoning infrastructure) and the very large discrepancy in PC market prices. While the suggestions for specific hardware, especially things like AMD GPUs, are usually quite good for US or European prices, there's often a large price discrepancy that would make an Indian parts list look very different. Unfortunately, a new user wouldn't really know that, and I'm sure you've seen the threads that say "I want to buy (x), is it good?" so if they hear that something performs well, it's on the menu, regardless of relative value.

That is something the user in question would be more responsible for. 

If you (or anyone else) feels it's that important to know the location of the OP, just tell them why it might be important.

 

Of course I don't know the specifics of the scenario you described, but if there are like 3 people not giving advice, but they just keep asking for he OP's location, I can totally understand a moderator moved in there to stop these people.

But that's just it; I don't know the context. So I can only say it usually will not matter a ton, if you just mention markets vary around the world.

[VEXICUS]

Haha...... Good to see that finally this thing got implemented.