I really appreciate when you or @JammyDodger do that, because even if there’s not an answer it shows that there’s the possibility of an answer and questions aren’t just being thrown into a void. I had a very, very frustrating time trying to learn Discourse theme/plugin development because there’s relatively little documentation compared to other projects I’ve worked with, and a lot of the documentation/walkthroughs that are here are hard to find or out of date in non-obvious ways to a newcomer. I appreciate when someone asks a question of clarification because sometimes as a newcomer it can be hard to even know the vocabulary for the question that one is trying to ask.
In my experience, Meta has been a relatively less friendly place to get started in because there’s often an assumed baseline familiarity with Discourse itself and hostility to questions that try to bridge that gap. I had some of my early questions or questions posted by others that would have been helpful to me met with a somewhat hostile ‘just read the code’ response when Discourse’s structure is kind of unfamiliar to people coming from other backgrounds and there’s no basic documentation about even how the project is structured to get someone started. I’m fairly experienced with Rails and js and I still find it quite confusing figuring out my way through Discourse source.
There’s also threads on here where people complain about the lack of documentation and are met with ‘so ask questions’ in response, but for a newcomer searching before posting (as the Discourse interface encourages one to do!) it creates a circular feeling for someone coming in completely new. Or at least that was my experience. I had a pretty negative first experience just asking for clarification trying to work through the intro to theme development post that new people/basic questions are often linked to, because the example in the walkthrough was out of date in a completely non-obvious way. It was really off-putting to follow the example that’s frequently pointed to as the beginner starting point, have it completely not work and ask why, and then get told that it was out of date and I should have known that. That’s not at all been my experience getting started in other project spaces.