Is this site supposed to be a helpful resource for questions and answers?

Question

Is this site supposed to be a helpful resource for ExpressionEngine questions and answers?

The reason I ask is that I have a fair amount of experience at Stack Overflow and WordPress Answers (and smaller amounts at Server Fault and Super User) posting questions and answers and learning enough to amass some reputation while being (hopefully) a member of those communities. http://stackexchange.com/users/flair/31169.png

But here, I'm getting what I can only describe as "attitude."

I posted this question: {email} and {url} returning admins info, not comment authors info The gist is I'm trying to export content from EE into Wordpress .wxr import format.

But these are the comments I got from Anna_MediaGirl (who also happens to be a moderator):

Comment: Can I ask what your EE experience is?

Answer: Very little. But that's irrelevant. This is a Q&A site, right?

Is this code you wrote or did you copy it from somewhere else?

Answer: Again, irrelevant. Doesn't matter where it came from. I'm not asking people to write code for me. I asked specific questions about code not 100% working for what I'm trying to do.

The code I posted should work perfectly.

Answer: I point out with my own edits the new code that I tried.

And finally:

You might also just want to pay someone to do this for you. It should take 5 minutes. It's a very quick thing to do.

Ok. Well, that's interesting. What happened to the Stack Exchange Q&A format here?

And: Is Anna_MediaGirl implying I should hire her? (I don't see it in the FAQ for this site, but the FAQs for SO and WPSE prohibit advertisements or solicitations for paid jobs.)

So, what's the deal? Am I getting attitude because I didn't write this code myself? Am I getting attitude because I'm trying to migrate a site away from EE? Because I'm using 2.7 core, the free version of EE?

Yes, I put a bounty on my question. Maybe someone can answer it. For me and the rest of the community. But after this, I doubt very much I'll be back. I'll stick with Google. And what help I can get from ellislab.com

Lastly, I think it's a good idea to throw this into Let's get critical: Sep 2013 Site Self-Evaluation Let's get critical: Sep 2013 Site Self-Evaluation and users and moderations can decide if your site is useful and encourages good questions. And answers.

Answer 1

To answer your question - yes, it is indeed meant to be a helpful resource for ExpressionEngine questions and answers.

I'm sorry you're put off by Anna's interaction with you. Sometimes, when comment threads get overlong, and two people aren't grokking each other, one party can get frustrated, and when that comes through, it frustrates the other party in turn. No one leaves happy.

As you can see by her rep here, Anna is a valued contributor who has helped many many folks. And if you look around the site you'll see hundreds of very helpful, positive interactions, and people getting the help they need. In fact, you have two other questions here in which you were helped very quickly and successfully.

Honestly, it strikes me that your question isn't serious, but instead is a snarky and rhetorical one, being used as a form of complaint, which you should probably have taken up directly with Anna.

Answer 2

Those are my comments...

No attitude at all! Quite the contrary... I was trying to get my head around the code you posted and your experience so I wasn't making any assumptions and my answers back to you were appropriate.

EE is so flexible that a developer can code something in many different ways in the templates with the same outcome. You posted a code sample that didn't make sense (to me) based on what you were trying to accomplish which is why I asked your experience and if you had copied the code... specifically the {embed:entry_id} part of your posted code... I needed to know the answers to my questions to help you further. I hope that makes sense with some added explanation.

The code I posted in my answer should absolutely work based on my understanding of what you are trying to do which is you are trying to output a list of comments for each entry...

After so much back and forth in the comments, I didn't see how else to help you hence my suggestion to hire someone. I sure wasn't meaning me... that didn't even cross my mind.

In this kind of support setup, I can't see your actual code, I can't see how you have templates set up, I can't see the URLs you're using to access the template... All these things contribute to how EE processes templates and may be why my code isn't working. If you're new to EE, it may be necessary for me to explain how EE "works" before my answers or code even make sense...

I'm a huge cheerleader for this site and absolutely don't want you to have a negative opinion because I'm impatient... so why don't you call me and I will edit the code directly. Really, we'll have this up and working in 10 minutes. I emailed you my phone number.