[META] Can we please gave a pinned rules post?

dfyx@lemmy.helios42.de to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 106 points –

Can we please get a post that explains what this community is for? Seems like nobody reads the sidebar (which is hard to access on most mobile clients) so we constantly get flooded with questions that would rather fit in !lemmy_support@lemmy.ml or !fediverse@lemmy.world

I understand that many people are still confused by how lemmy works but we should make clear that this is for general questions and discussions similar to what /r/askreddit was and not a place to ask technical questions about lemmy.

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Currently, we're being a little more lax with the support questions because of how new Lemmy is. Once the platform has matured a bit more, we'll move to being more strict about enforcing our rules on support questions.

Edit: Ignore me, I'm a dumbass and forgot which instance I'm looking at.

That sounds fair. Because this community has given me better answer than what I could get at support.

Indeed, right now we're one of if not the largest questions community, even larger than !asklemmy@lemmy.ml, so there are more resources here than other places.

I think it will get better when search engines start indexing everything. Right now it's pretty hard to find any answers for lemmy outside of lemmy, so I could see how it can be confusing for new users trying to figure it out.

To be fair, this is somewhat true of !asklemmy@lemmy.ml as well - but we want to make sure the interesting questions aren't drowned out by the support questions.

That would be useful. Rules are currently on the sidebar, but most mobile users don't see them.

Okay, I just noticed that such a post already exists but for some reasons, the pinned state doesn't federate correctly. On lemmy.ml it's pinned to the top, on my personal instance the post has a pin icon but appears way down.

Same on mine, pinned posts tend to be tricky for federation it seems. Hopefully fixed in a future Lemmy version

Isn't it considered polite to read the rules/sidebar before posting in a new community or forum?

We do have pinned posts - but due to other issues, these may not always sync through to each instance. Believe me, I wish they did. :)

Please do keep pointing out rule #3 about support. Please also go ahead and flag threads (and especially comments!) for the mods. We're a small team and the extra help would be great.

I was thinking about suggesting a default bot response to every post. Something along the lines of “hey are you looking for actual lemmy support? If so go here…”

I normally hate autoreply bots with a vengeance, but here is a clear case where it is needed!