Re:why I don't post much in botdev

[Arta]

That's a pretty good idea. A reference archive for stuff that's useful and worth reading. I like that.

[tA-Kane]

Here's a few things I think should go into the reference archive:

* "What Goes Into a Bot - Terminology"; describe BNCS, BNLS, CSB, BotNet, how they mix and mingle, and other basic knowledge that we expect[/i]  people to know when they ask questions

* Basic (and perhaps intermediate?) CSB help/info

* Event information (perhaps just copy + paste or link to the packet 0x0f tutorial on botdev)

* CDKeyDecode, HashData, and CheckRevision information (also, perhaps links to download libraries and/or source), as well as the BNLS equivalents

* BNI parsing and adding icons to a ListView

* Getting profiles and all known profile keys, as well as which keys are cross-product (eg, which keys work when you get a WAR3 user's profile while logged onto STAR and vice-versa).

* Friends list information (how it works)

* Clan information (how it works, what you can and can't do)

* BNCS's game packets (eg getting the game list, game create, game leave, game results, etc... not the individual game packets for each game)

* MCP usage (how to connect and login, how to select a character, how to change a character, etc)

* Getting 0 or -1 ping, and getting the No UDP flag, as well as which products don't allow which (such as WarCraft 3 doesn't allow for -1 ping nor No UDP, IIRC).

* Using Wildcards (common wildcard usage and how it's generally expected to work; perhaps some code examples)

* User databases (both letter (flags?) based and number based user databases, and how they might work)


Also, I think that in order to encourage use of this new forum, the total number of threads shouldn't exceed one or perhaps two pages... otherwise it'd start to get hard to find them without using the search feature (as most new threads in here don't).

Lastly, I'd expect that we'd still get lots of new threads on our current forum. Even so, having a separate "reference" forum would make it devilishly easy to simply say "go read this" and then paste in a URL for the user to read. The thread that we link to should be simple enough that almost anyone that says "i don't understand" would most likely be too stupid to do anything programming related.

[Tuberload]

Lastly, I'd expect that we'd still get lots of new threads on our current forum. Even so, having a separate "reference" forum would make it devilishly easy to simply say "go read this" and then paste in a URL for the user to read. The thread that we link to should be simple enough that almost anyone that says "i don't understand" would most likely be too stupid to do anything programming related.

I was more concerned with the people that aren't too stupid when I brought up the idea. I know for myself at least, references are an invaluable tool to help me with my bad memory.   It is nice being able to quickly find information on a subject, when I am faced with a problem that would benefit from the information.