What general or specific changes do you think should be made to Electronics.SE to make it the best place to get good answers to questions about DIY Electronics Hacking? If you're familiar with other StackExchange-based sites, what are they doing that we should? What are you looking for here (beyond specific answers to specific questions) that you haven't found?
Please put one suggestion per answer, and vote up or comment on existing answers instead of adding duplicates.
Something that needs to be done to address the specific nature of electronics tinkering is the ability to communicate schematics effectively. This is, unfortunately, an ill-defined problem to solve.
It would be nice if they could be sequentially numbered, even better if we can manage forks in projects, and upvoting would be nice as well.
These functions partially fall under the idea of the community wiki as well, but not fully, and I'm not really sure what the best solution is (or if it's just as simple as letting people link to schematics, like they can already do).
I think one of the most important things that will make Chiphacker better is to try to reach out to other major DIY and hardware businesses like Adafruit, Sparkfun, DIY Drones, Practical Arduino, etc.
Not trying to be specific to Arduinos but you get the point.
Those companies and people have HUGE followings. I didn't even know this site existed if it weren't for Adafruit.
In the long run it would be great to see DIY companies start using chiphacker.com as a way to support their products and ditch those crapping forums!
Another suggestion about style sheets...the colors are too low contrast for my liking. 80% of everything is just a different shade of grey-green, I think there should be more variation
Looking at the front page I see several people are adding answers, editing questions and answers, but few people are voting up questions and answers. We need to give people immediate positive feedback on their answers and questions if we want to retain them.
If you see an interesting question (heck, any question!) or a useful answer, vote it up!
Otherwise the place is going to look dead and feel dead.
The reputation system is great for motivating people with knowledge. Reward them liberally! Voting up costs nothing, and you may keep someone around who might otherwise leave when no one visibly appreciates their contribution. Plus it's very addicting, and a key to stackoverflow's success.
We can't be stingy with votes, and we can't (as a small community) use the voting strategies we might usually employ on the busier sites.
The ability to upload an image/file directly and not have to link to a URL.
Some portable (amongst browsers) way to express maths would be nice. It would probably have to create an image that is shown in the post (inline).
NB:
Not only will people with high rep be able to edit our text, but also our math :) This may bring a whole new meaning to the term 'edit war' :) Should be fun.
One of the features of the 'Trilogy' sites (Stackoverflow, ServerFault, and SuperUser) is that if you have a good reputation on one of them, it's possible to copy your profile to the others, and you'll start with a reputation of 101 instead of 1. This makes it a LOT easier to start answering questions on the newer sites. I wish I could have had the same sort of 'step-up' here -- the first 100 points of reputation are the hardest to get...
I'd like to see some (minor) changes to the stylesheet that ChipHacker uses. Specifically, if the user profile page, StackExchange uses the 'answered-accepted' style to distinguish between answers and answers that have been accepted. ChipHacker doesn't use the answer-accepted style -- can that be changed?
The twitter feed comes through with a duplicate question when an answer is posted.
Maybe just twitter the original question.
I think that Comments should be enabled at a lower reputation (possibly after just one post) as things that should be discussed using them have to be discussed using posts otherwise cluttering up the discussions.
Suggesting a wiki here is like proposing Wikipedia to change to a phpbb. They are different concepts. There are plenty of DIY wikis already.
I would like to see a mobile version, so I could more effectively answer and ask when not at home (i.e., using my smart phone)
A clear description of what belongs here and what should be asked on other sites, like electronics.stackexchange.com. This sort of thing works best if there's only one obvious place to ask a specific question. Otherwise the answerers are divided between lots of different sites, and the quality of the answers won't be as good. http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch04s02.html#spot_rule
A wiki, to collect provided information. A massive database of Q&A is OK, but consolidating that info is better.
I would also like to see a way to aggregate projects. The best questions are usually atomic in nature, and the more specific, the better the answer can be. Widely-scoped questions are interesting, of course, and much can be learned from them, but if people want to share an entire project I would like to be able to see a project, which isn't really a question, and all of the questions linked to that project.
This may be something that could be handled by making wiki pages for projects, and tagging the questions related to that project by the wiki project name. It doesn't have to be a complex scheme, but a project should not be a question. A project should be composed of questions. This site has the questions part addressed, but it's not easy to collect all the information on a project (assuming people want to share their projects).
The most important thing right now is to get more users. That means we all need to answer as many questions as we can and point folks on other sites here whenever it's appropriate. Spamming other forums is not helpful, but links in .sig blocks and so on would certainly be appropriate.
In my opinion the colour scheme is quite horrible and needs to change :P
And someone posted about people not voting up answers, well the problem is that very few people actually have enough reputation to do so.
Don't limit it to questions about "physical computing". Let it be generally electronics-releated.
Something that I've noticed between this site and the other sites (Stack Overflow & similar) is that their icon is the same as their favicon. Other than that, I agree with the style-sheets. In the other sites, they have a plain white background, with black text, and a good set of style rules when it comes to other elements.
Other than these two style-related things, I think chiphacker.com is a pretty good site.
Has anyone ever made a web-based schematic drawing tool? A website where you can draw simple schematics that are defined by a short code and then reference them by URL on other sites and it will show the cached schematic defined by the URL or re-generate it on demand.
Or maybe like a data uri format that encodes a simple markup language or something.
It would be valuable to have a simple format that would enable others to make changes to circuits, though, unlike an image. If it was compact enough, you wouldn't need to host it anywhere, you could just include it inline, like ASCII art. Or you could post them on pastebins or whatever and then "fork each other's code" to show modifications, like http://gist.github.com
I don't know. Just brainstorming.
I think a wiki would consolidate ideas, yes, but it wouldn't show the questions and worse or incorrect answers, which sometimes are more interesting than the correct ones.
I think both formats have their place. For a wiki why not use Open Circuits they are looking for more authors. See http://www.opencircuits.com/
I would like to see more of a users profile details, or even a signature on the answers.
Those of us who maintain our own websites always like to see a little extra traffic for our egos sake :)
Coming from the other point of view, I guess that over half of the RSS feeds I follow were sites that I found linked to in forum signatures.
If we wish to attract some of the owners of big hitting sites traffic wise, a chance to promote in an unobtrusive manner (ie via the quality of the assistance offered) their sites is only going to help.
Arrange the site to separate the types of questions. Something like one column for electronics specific questions, one for micro controller questions, one for programming, one for "all else". It would make searching much more useful to those with questions in one area. Even doing the "Craigslist" hyper linked main page which then goes to the individual areas. It would be easy to improve that by adding the latest questions to a shoutbox so people can get a quick glance of where the days' inquiries are coming from.