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 thats is created to help people with their OpenCV implementation problems. This immediatly 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: 1. Questions that handle software that has nothing to do with OpenCV. 2. 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. 3. 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. 4. 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 devellopers, please go to the designated IRC channel (http://freenode.net/ - #opencv).
Before we start with just a fun thing 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 going deeper into how to create 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 it's development. Basically the power behind this Q&A forum is that everyone is in fact a moderator. You start out with basic rights, but the more active you become, the more you participate in questions, the more you will be rewarded for it.
This forum uses a reward system, based on karma points, which shows how much other users appreciate your input. For each question you post, for each comment you make, for each solution you provide, people can endorse your efforts. The following steps and ilustrations show exactly what is possible.
Karma and badge system
Karma basically tells you if your contributions to the Q&A forum are usefull and helped people solve their problems. Each vote in favor will generate 10 points, each vote against will subtract 1 of your points. There is a limit of 200 points that can be accumulated for a single question or answer per day.
If one of your questions gets accepted you will gain 15 points.
The table below explains reputation point requirements for each type of moderation task.
- 5 karma points = upvote rights
- 10 karma points = rights to add comments
- 20 karma points = accept own answer to own questions
- 25 karma points = open and close own questions
- 50 karma points = downvote rights & retag other's questions
- 75 karma points = edit community wiki questions
- 200 karma points = edit any answer & delete any comment
Besides the karma points, the forum assigns badges to people who perform certain moderation tasks. This goes from answering 100 questions to editing enough questions and even adapting or creating tags for questions. This shows to the community which tasks you assign yourself in moderating the Q&A forum.
Voting up/down answers
This functionality is used to express your gratitude to people that help solving your or others problems. Upvoting is done when the question or answer is interesting or satisfying in accordance to the problem. Downvoting is basically used as a warning towards the author of the topic. It is a way of telling them that they should take a second look at their post and try to adapt it, in order to get a good question.
Voting up comments
For comments, only upvoting is allowed. Since this area is used to have remarks on questions or to make people aware of mistakes, no downvoting is allowed here. It is mainly used to express gratitude versus a good remark or extra insight into the problem.
Accepting answers
Once the problem is solved, the author of the question is allowed to select an answer that helped him the most. This ensures that the question doesn't stay open. If a solution isn't selected after more the 10 days, forum moderators can select an answer in stead of the topic owner.
Closing topics or deleting topics
Once you have been around some time and gathered enough karma, it is possible to close down or delete questions. This can be done by pushing the close or delete button in the message options (see figure below).
However, remember to have the curtesy to tell people why you close down their topic by applying the following rules. 1. Give a reason of closure, by selecting the most correct option from the dropdown menu. 2. Add a comment before closing, stating clearly why you have closed the topic down.
Only delete topics or comments if they are completely inapproriate. Examples can be advertising, rude behaviour or pornographic material. For inappropriate behaviour, you could also use the flag offensive button.
Step 2 - Using the information that is already available
Whenever you are in need of help, you should first do some steps to check whether this problem hasn't been solved before. This can be done in multiple ways.
Using the Q&A search button
In the top right corner of the forum, there is a search option. Searching can either be done by topic title or by topic labels. Therefore always try some hits with the search toolbar (as seen in the figure below). It will point you to people having the same issues and many times it will directly lead you to a solution without the need of creating an own topic.
Be aware that topic aren't always marked as answered. However, this does not mean the solution could not be right there. Put some effort in effectively reading through the hits.
If you have a good remark to add to the topic, please do so. Also, if you would find a solution for an unanswered question, put some effort in solving it. You will help the author and the community with your addition.
Using the good old google search engine
People seem to have forgotton that the world wide web actually has powerful search engines that could help you find the solution to your problem. Expecially installation problems are solved quite fast this way, without the need of creating a complete new topic.
In order to get a correct hit, try to use some label words specific to your problem accompagnied of the words OpenCV, the version, your operating system and the program language used.
Using fora specific for OpenCV
There are many places that contain a lot of solutions to OpenCV problems. Keep always in mind that you are probably not the only one having a certain issue. One of the many used resources, even as answers to problems formulated here, is stackoverflow. The image shows that OpenCV is a common discussed topic there.
