The accessibility problem

[dvgrn]

Okay, there's a thread on the new board with a title that starts with "FAQ", and it's a particularly important topic. I've pinned it, at least for now -- not that it will matter until there are more threads!

I'm looking for suggestions on what to do with a previous round of FAQ creation, from 2021 on the LifeWiki: there's a main README page and an associated FAQ page. Both of them seem solid enough that they don't really need to hide in userspace any more.

Any suggestions on where (on the LifeWiki) to put these two pages instead? Once they're moved, I'll probably add links to them fairly prominently from the "Help for Newcomers" thread, but maybe they could be advertised elsewhere as well. It seems okay to have multiple paths to Frequently Asked Questions pages.

Would a more general "FAQ: Basics" forum thread be a good addition? Seems like there's potentially a stage of newcomer-ness that's even earlier than the stage of having made a discovery and wondering whether it's been seen before.

[confocaloid]

Okay, there's a thread on the new board with a title that starts with "FAQ", and it's a particularly important topic. I've pinned it, at least for now -- not that it will matter until there are more threads! [...]

I don't see a reason why that FAQ thread needs to be pinned. That seems a bit premature. There are indeed few threads right now so all of them are easy to see; when there are more threads, it would be easier to understand which of those need to be pinned.

[...] Would a more general "FAQ: Basics" forum thread be a good addition? Seems like there's potentially a stage of newcomer-ness that's even earlier than the stage of having made a discovery and wondering whether it's been seen before.

From your description, it sounds like that would be essentially a duplicate of the already existing Help for Newcomers. It may be an improvement to rename that existing thread to follow the same pattern (e.g. "FAQ: Basics"), but I don't see good reasons to duplicate the same idea in different threads.

[dvgrn]

From your description, it sounds like that would be essentially a duplicate of the already existing Help for Newcomers. It may be an improvement to rename that existing thread to follow the same pattern (e.g. "FAQ: Basics"), but I don't see good reasons to duplicate the same idea in different threads.

Okay. I've added links to the current LifeWiki README and FAQ pages, but have left the article locations and the name of the thread the same for now.

"Help for Newcomers" is currently labeled in the first post as "Work in Progress". I'm really not at all clear yet on what its content should be.

I've tried incorporating suggestions so far, as best I can, but I'm happy to re-edit as needed. The first posts in threads on the Help / Support board seem like they're worth paying extra attention to, since it's more likely that newcomers will see them early on.

[confocaloid]

[...]
"Help for Newcomers" is currently labeled in the first post as "Work in Progress". I'm really not at all clear yet on what its content should be.
[...]

It might be better to just proceed from known "frequently asked questions" or an equivalent of that.

"FAQ: Golly"?

As a concrete example, as far as I can tell, beginners often run into various problems on how to use Golly. That includes "how to use Golly at all", "how to use Golly to do X", "how to use Golly in a well-organized and competent way". There are some nonobvious features.

While there's the built-in Golly documentation / help system, and moreover there are already wiki pages Tutorials/Golly, Tutorials/More Golly, Tutorials/Scripts [side note: the latter still mentions Perl which is no longer there], I think it could help to have a forum thread titled "FAQ: Golly" and arranged in the typical "question, answer" way (and also linking to the tutorial wiki pages, among other things).

[dvgrn]

"FAQ: Golly"?

Sounds good. So not just one thread that says "FAQ", but (what will eventually be) a series of FAQs grouped by specific topics named in the title.

I think it works for anyone who wants to create new FAQ threads to go ahead and do it, as soon as they have a "critical mass" of short questions-and-answers written up -- like the four you started with in FAQ: Is this a new discovery?

I.e., let's not start new empty FAQ threads and hope someone else will do all of the question-and-answer writing, in replies. But as soon as there are a few Qs and As to start with, that's good enough -- it will be easy to edit more in later.

[squareroot12621]

Regarding the lack of fun, intuitive GUIs, would Conway's Story Mode be something worth continuing?
*checks watch* Has this been my first post in five months? It doesn't seem like it's been that long...

[confocaloid]

Regarding the lack of fun, intuitive GUIs, would Conway's Story Mode be something worth continuing?
*checks watch* Has this been my first post in five months? It doesn't seem like it's been that long...

At very least there are interesting ideas in that thread, which are something worth thinking about.

For what it's worth, at some point I reinterpreted the subject line "The accessibility problem" as a description of a glider synthesis puzzle, where one is asked to place a small object in a hard-to-access place that might look inaccessible at first:

Code: Select all

#C "An accessibility problem"?
#C https://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=171933#p171933
#C https://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=169588#p169588
#C https://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=169285#p169285
x = 215, y = 115, rule = LifeHistory
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[squareroot12621]

Regarding the lack of fun, intuitive GUIs, would Conway's Story Mode be something worth continuing?
*checks watch* Has this been my first post in five months? It doesn't seem like it's been that long...

At very least there are interesting ideas in that thread, which are something worth thinking about.
…

I did have a Python implementation in the post I linked to, but it was missing the functionality for the Play, Sandbox, and Settings screens.
As far as I remember, I was making the lessons in ↓this Google Doc.