Back when I was a UMS Assistance mod, I noticed a few things that were lacking in the forum, so I made them myself. The first thing, was that the wiki was hard to find and therefore hard to utilize for new mappers, so I made the FAQ topic and pinned it right at the top of the forum for greater accessibility. Hopefully our new wiki will be a lot easier to find and use, but my first suggestion for SC2 is to begin compiling an FAQ topic for each assistance forum. They shouldn't be quite as in depth as the wiki articles, but should probably contain links to them, and at least a summary of the basic points. Having that information RIGHT THERE should be helpful to the newbies, and hopefully ease some of the burden of the SC2 assistance mods.
The second thing I noticed, was that we didn't even have an article on the most essential function of the editor: triggers. It was only recently that NudeRaider, myself, and DavidJCobb got together an article on exactly how triggers work, whereas the actual knowledge for it had been around for years. This knowledge might be second nature to people who have been around longer, but to a newbie, they would probably never suspect the exact way that triggers work. So my second suggestion, is to identify and focus on this sort of basic functionality with the editor. Instead of focusing on the difficult complex workarounds for whatever may be in the new editor, figure out the sort of basic "2 frames, trigger check, 2 frames, trigger check" functionality and get that information into a wiki article.
Thirdly, I've noticed there are three ways of getting help, and our third one is lacking. First, there is the straight-up "read-the-wiki-article" type knowledge, which was a strong point of SEN in v4, but not so much in v5 due to the unfinished nature of it. The second, is the use of the Assistance forums. Sometimes it helps to just have another human being go point by point and explain something to you, even if its almost exactly what you read in the wiki article. You can ask questions to a person, but not a wiki article. The third type of help, which unfortunately has always been a poor point on SEN, is learning from other people's work and problems. The search function here was never all that great, and finding topics with a similar nature can be difficult. To answer this problem, I believe will require work on the coding side, in conjunction with the staff. Essentially, if it is possible, simply draw on the posts from the Assistance topics. My idea is to have the Assistance mods be able to "flag" posts either as a "problem" or "answer" and be able to organize these posts almost like a new topic. The idea is to circumvent the whole "search" problem, because even if you find the right topic, a lot of times its hard to get to the useful information because the first few posts are unclear or round-about in their explanation. Allowing the (presumably knowlegable staff) to flag only the clear and helpful posts for use would help circumvent this. This could even replace the "FAQ" topics suggestion. Instead of a staff-written FAQ for every forum, have a "FAQ" topic with links like "how to do A" or "the properties of B" ect., then when the user clicks the link, it takes them to a topic of just the problem post + answer post, instead of having to sift through an entire topic.
I think the main point here is to compile a lot of this knowledge as we find it out and make it readily accessible, instead of waiting till SC3 comes out to write it down and hiding it behind a user-unfriendly system. A good Mapmaking Assistance forum could really be the lifeblood of SEN in SC2.
None.
