[GUIDE] - A beginners guide to the Q&A forum (first steps to take)
OpenCV documentation : beginners guide to the Q&A forum
ATTENTION This is still a guide under construction. It would be fine if people would refrain from posting comments until it is completely finished and stickied. On the other hand, tons of information is grabbed from around the OpenCV resources. If someone would feel that they need to be mentioned, please contact me.
The main goal of this guide is to provide some basic guidance for new members of the Q&A forum. By going through this guide a first time before posting questions, we aim to get a more structured forum, with well formulated questions and answers. By making people aware of these basic guide and rules, moderators will be able to enforce the forum rules, pointing people to this topic when needed.
Step 0 - A small intro : what can I expect from a Q&A forum?
A Question & Answer forum is basically a forum which is created to help people with their OpenCV implementation problems. This immediately infers that everything posted on this forum should be related and relevant to developing OpenCV applications and problems resulting from doing so.
Keep in mind that this is a forum where we motivate people to go head on with their challenges. Basically the following types of questions are not allowed on this forum:
Questions that handle software that has nothing to do with OpenCV.
Questions about your homework and school projects. Please do not beg for code, instead try some tutorials and tell us what is going wrong. If you have a deadline to catch and the only way is to let people make your projects, then you basically started to late.
Questions that handle general debugging / programming issues. By this we mean problems that should be adressed to the fora specially designed for helping people with these problems out.
Questions about problems with openCV wrappers (EmguCV, JavaCV, OpenCVSharp, ...) or extension libraries (cvBlobsLib, opencvx, ...). Again these problems should be adressed to the proper fora.
Also focus on the fact that the forum is a question and answer area. We do not encourage large discussions inside topics, but still, small remarks can be left using comments. If you want to participate into head on discussions or meet other OpenCV developers, please go to the designated IRC channel (http://freenode.net/ - #opencv).
Before we start over, a fun fact to know: if you want to assign yourself an avatar, please go to gravatar.com, and register yourself with the same email adress as on this forum. Personalise your account with an image you prefer and it will be visible on this forum.
Step 1 - The forum itself, how to use it?
Before stepping deeper into creating a decent post, we would like to show you the provided functionality on the forum. By knowing how this forum works, we encourage people to participate in its development. Basically the power behind this Q&A forum is that everyone is in fact a moderator. You ...
@Alexander Shishkov : if it is possible, please close down comments and answers as long guide isn't completed yet :) This is the sticky I told you about.
@Guanta, if you want to go through it for spelling correction, feel free. However, keep in mind that I will still change things and that last part is not finished yet.
Btw what do you guys think about the structure? Is it clear using these lines? Or should I use an answer for each part?
@StevenPuttemans , I have a question. Is is ok to advertise my blog here? Perhaps only specific posts? I'm currently working on a tutorial to binary descriptors that includes openCV usage.
Why wouldn't it be? As long as you do not create a question for every single advertisement, but only use it to answer people's problems, then it is ok. You can also add a link to your tutorial in your profile URL.