One of the things we've been discussing lately is the need to update many of the tutorials with a "clean slate" as a lot of them have a lot of comments discussing issues from back in the early days of the VPN that may no longer be relevant, and we've had comments telling us that level of technical discussion is intimidating.

So, to that end we're trying to redo some of the tutorials to make them as simple as we can (and possibly as visual as we can) while removing many of the old comments that may be confusing people. Any tutorials we've updated have been in new topics, and the old ones have been retired, as they may still be worth referring to for anyone interested.

I have some screenshots for a new viscosity tutorial ready, so it's just a matter of writing it up

I agree on the endless comments under guides being confusing and/or intimidating to new users. In fact your post here made me just realized how important clean one post threads are for guides. Our little discussion here already draws away attention from the relevant facts in the first post. Imagine the effect on those giant HOWTO Threads.

I'd be very happy/proud if my individual guides could be separated from the discussions, maybe edited to your liking and then be used as those new clean guides you intend to provide. I spent lots of time and energy to create and update them so it would be a shame if they'd be disposed of. I'll see if I can make them even simpler and in fact already cut out all the crap from the leakblock guide so it's a very clean guide now.

But if you plan for something totally different: Then be it. In the end the result is what is important: Clean and easy to understand guides that can be easily found.

I tend, after a couple decades of experimentation with various threaded discussion platforms, to have one thread that's a single post - and locked - with dynamically-iterated updates in that post... and then a link to a different thread that's open, and encourages comment and edit and expansion on the original post.

The data and expertise from the second thread can then be "brought up" to the single-post thread as it matures. This allows folks who just want the current data to hit the single-post thread, and those who want to contribute or critique full access to place designed specifically to do that.

In large part, I've picked that tactic up from some of the Android ROM modding forums that can have hundreds or even thousands of detailled, relevant posts under a single howto guide. I figure of those kids have worked out a system that's viable under that kind of traffic load, we can do the same here with little risk of epic fail.

In theory

Cheers,

~ pj

ps: sorry to be butting in on your locked thread, DS... rather rude thing to do. :-/

Pattern_Juggled wrote:ps: sorry to be butting in on your locked thread, DS... rather rude thing to do. :-/

No problem pj, that's totally fine! This is a issue that needs to be discussed or better decided on so it can be included in the current forum upgrade process. (More and more things pop up around here and I like those new features a lot!)

In fact I waited for an official statement like this or an answer to my plea not making my guides obsolete. With your suggestion now I can edit and split my HOWTO Guides so they fit the new approach and hopefully they can become part of the official guides. I'll tackle this task the coming days.