This.
Apparently the people who are volunteering to contribute to the docs are not doing a good job in a lot of user’s opinion. But none of these complainers are doing anything about it. And so once a month or so we get to hear someone who is apparently frustrated come on this forum and tell us how we are doing it all wrong and offer all this wonderful advice about how we need to write the docs better. And they all have the same attributes:
- they aren’t volunteering to do it
- somehow they think all the advice is something new to us, “Thank you new user! If only we had realized the docs were complicated we would have made it simpler! I never would have thought of that.” We were all beginners with OH at some point too. Many of us have spent hundreds of hours helping new users with problems. And some frustrated new user posts essentially the same post once a month. Do they think we don’t know? Do they think their sage advice is something we’ve never thought of over the years?
- they all underestimate how hard and complex home automation is in the first place
- they don’t give us any credit for perhaps knowing stuff they don’t
But of course the other side is the thousands of users who have found the docs to be adequate and useful to get started with OH and use OH never post about it. We never hear from them. All we hear are the complaints. Interestingly, those tend to be the users who do volunteer to help with the docs.
So are the docs really as bad as everyone who posts to bitch about them, or are a lot of these users coming to openHAB with false expectations? I don’t know anymore. And honestly I’m done typing the same stuff every time it comes up.
How to get started (there is no step-by-step tutorial) is now going to be my stock reply. At least on person on this thread bothered to click through.