Private forum for engineers/engineering students?

[Starglider]

Well, Starglider, this board is run by an engineer, so engineers have always had sort of an especially prominent position on it because of Mike's visbility.

Then I suggest you start a new thread proposing that everyone who can prove they are a certified engineer gets a special '100% REAL ENGINEER!!!' graphic under their avatar.

Also, does this mean you think the MESS is completely pointless?

No. Firstly because putting your life on the line to defend your countrymen really is a special and unique undertaking, and secondly because military threads attract a level of political heckling and tough-guy wannabes that no other profession does.

I'll point out that for all that the military is bound by a rigid code of ethics, so too is the engineering profession--military personnel must be trained to fight and kill and suffer deprivation, but engineers must be grimly aware of the fact that if they're tempted or cajoled into compromising on safety issues by penny-pinching managers and developers they could be responsible for the deaths of thousands

Yes, thank you, I am quite aware of that and it is not comparable. Possibly maybe killing some people if you get a design wrong is not the same as going out into a sweltering desert full of people trying to kill you, watching your friends get shot and blown up and then coming home to a reception of protestors throwing excrement at you. Of course most modern western military personnel have it easier than that, but lets face it, most engineers do not make safety critical decisions on a regular basis. I know plenty of electrical engineers and the safety aspect usually amounts to remembering to ground the case and specifying the right fuse.

If you had got this forum I would have had to demand that programmers get a special forum, because we can't WHINE PROPERLY ABOUT THE LUSERS in G&C without irritating backchat from the plebs.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Eh, whatever. I had mostly wanted a private forum for the exchange of career advice and obscure jokes, the former being particularly important, and I couldn't think of another good way to get it without leaving it up for googlesearch to cache, and it occurred to me that might not be particularly brilliant or wise in some cases. Mind you I'd support a closed career advisory forum on the board for everyone, as well.

[Phantasee]

[snip] I've just always found engineering as a profession to have a very ardent defender and proponent in Mike and certainly my friends seem to regard the stereotype of SD.net as being an engineering board[snip]

This is why we don't need an engineering usergroup. The whole board is pretty much an engineering forum, from SWvsST, skipping Fanfics, but then SLAM is full of that sort of thing, OT has many threads related to the profession, and N&P usually has more technical news stories than most other places on the Internet. For a group that's going to be as low traffic as that, I highly recommend just posting in Testing. Google will cache it, but the cache disappears shortly after when Googlebot crawls through again and the thread's been deleted (usually within a couple weeks).

[The Spartan]

We've had a little bit of debate in the past about whether or not engineers are obligated to teach or not. Well, no, they're not obligated but it sure is nice when they do so. In some instances you can translate to "layman's terms", but in some you can't.

Just so we're clear, I don't think anyone can be made to teach, I just think they should take it upon themselves to do so.

[Havok]

The way I see the usergroup sub forums or whatever they are called is based on the four that I am in.

Justice League: Specific comic book talk, that would clutter up fantasy with almost spammy type questions and idea bouncing.

Writers Guild: A place for feed back and privacy for ideas that people don't want shared with the rest of the board or internet.

SPQR Development: A very small specific group that are trying... VERY SLOWLY... to make an alt history game based on Ancient Rome.

Brotherhood of the Monkey: Porn, which should not be public and spam that would otherwise be purged or locked. 'Tis a silly place.

All four of these groups are pretty damn slow, with only about one thread getting any action at any given time.

Now, I don't know much about engineering, but I'm sure there are ideas that one may come up that they want to bounce off other engineers, maybe even get patented or some such that they only want a trusted, very small, group of people knowing about. (If that is how it works)

If my assessment is correct, then I see no problem with the idea of a sub forum with this specific group in mind, as both the JL, SPQR and WG already fall under what I described. And honestly, this is like the smiley thing. If you don't want to be bugged by the forum, don't join it. If you aren't a member than you won't even know it is there when you log in.

My only problem with this particular idea, is that it was brought up in here. I'm not sure why this is a HoC, or even a Senate issue, for that matter, as I recall no such discussion or vote for the SPQR user group sub forum. It was just there one day and I got "drafted". Seems to be an admin or Mike issue.

[fgalkin]

Eh, whatever. I had mostly wanted a private forum for the exchange of career advice and obscure jokes, the former being particularly important, and I couldn't think of another good way to get it without leaving it up for googlesearch to cache, and it occurred to me that might not be particularly brilliant or wise in some cases. Mind you I'd support a closed career advisory forum on the board for everyone, as well.

I like the idea of a closed career advice forum, much like we have a sex and relationships advice forum. Especially considering that many of our members are in high school or college and will be entering the workforce soon.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[Havok]

As an example of my point, Thanas PMed me completely unaware that a SPQR Development group even existed, because, if you don't go looking for them, you don't even know they are there. Basically, if Mike or the admins (whoever actually does it) doesn't have an issue setting it up, it shouldn't be an issue with anyone else.

[Phantasee]

As an example of my point, Thanas PMed me completely unaware that a SPQR Development group even existed, because, if you don't go looking for them, you don't even know they are there. Basically, if Mike or the admins (whoever actually does it) doesn't have an issue setting it up, it shouldn't be an issue with anyone else.

Shit man, Thanas can have my spot. I don't even know what the hell I'm doing in it, I think I just posted in Ando's thread talking about it and got added to the group when it was made. I have nothing to contribute, honestly. What I do know is nothing compared to someone like Thanas, and I can't draw well enough to even consider helping out Havok.

I can spell check, I suppose...

[The Duchess of Zeon]

I didn't know about it either; why am I not in this? I have fricking written an alt-hist novel about a POD in Hellenistic times.

[Havok]

I didn't know about it either; why am I not in this? I have fricking written an alt-hist novel about a POD in Hellenistic times.

I imagine no one would know about your engineering group if you hand't brought it up to the chuckleheads in here.

PM Weemadando. Thanas already has me motivated to get some drawing done. Perhaps that, and some new members that are actually interested, will get everyone else going as well.

[fgalkin]

I didn't even know it existed until we upgraded to the new software and I got access to stuff I didn't before. And I'm a Supermod, for Emperor's sake!

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[erik_t]

Leaving aside the question of utility or worth, how would the membership of such a private forum be enforced? I mean even if there were an uncontroversial way to decide at what level a student going towards an engineering degree becomes an "engineering student" (some worthless fuck who's only taken general ed requirements but "plans to start taking engineering classes real soon now" would presumably not qualify), what's to prevent a bullshitter? I understand the MESS uses arcane military knowledge and a network of people-knowing-people-knowing-people, but there are an awful lot of engineering disciplines and I'm not sure that an effective "membership test" could be generated.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Leaving aside the question of utility or worth, how would the membership of such a private forum be enforced? I mean even if there were an uncontroversial way to decide at what level a student going towards an engineering degree becomes an "engineering student" (some worthless fuck who's only taken general ed requirements but "plans to start taking engineering classes real soon now" would presumably not qualify), what's to prevent a bullshitter? I understand the MESS uses arcane military knowledge and a network of people-knowing-people-knowing-people, but there are an awful lot of engineering disciplines and I'm not sure that an effective "membership test" could be generated.

I was thinking of a copy of an unofficial transcript with the SID redacted to comply with federal and university privacy laws, showing passage of at least Statics with a 2.0 or better.

[erik_t]

Such a thing would be comically trivial to fake. I've never seen an unofficial transcript that wasn't literally just plaintext.

[Coyote]

It might be worth considering if the Engineers currently on here were having trouble having normal discussions without interruptions by nosy understudy types. Right now the board population-- large as it is --probably doesn't support a big enough population of engineers who are having this problem to require such a group.

Besides, engineering is such a large field-- it's like saying someone is a "scientist" --that a person might end up being the only representative in their field and what fun would that be? ("Any other 'aeronautical' here? Anyone? Beuller?")

Besides, we all benefit when the engineers bring their high-falutin' talk out here to the bullpen.

[Edi]

Leaving aside the question of utility or worth, how would the membership of such a private forum be enforced? I mean even if there were an uncontroversial way to decide at what level a student going towards an engineering degree becomes an "engineering student" (some worthless fuck who's only taken general ed requirements but "plans to start taking engineering classes real soon now" would presumably not qualify), what's to prevent a bullshitter? I understand the MESS uses arcane military knowledge and a network of people-knowing-people-knowing-people, but there are an awful lot of engineering disciplines and I'm not sure that an effective "membership test" could be generated.

I was thinking of a copy of an unofficial transcript with the SID redacted to comply with federal and university privacy laws, showing passage of at least Statics with a 2.0 or better.

Is this thread still going on? In any case, in response to this point, what about non-US engineers and engineering students? Foreign systems don't necessarily use the same grading system as the US does and there would be no way to check anything necessarily.

Then there's the question of people who are engineering students and who are serious about it, but what if they can't hack it? If we had had this hypothetical group back in the beginning of the board, I'd have qualified. I actually completed a fairly large portion of a computer engineering B.Sc. degree, but in the end it proved too difficult for various reasons. So I left it. I still have the knowledge I learned there, but I'm no engineer. Just a computer technician.

This whole idea about a specific group for engineering people is completely retarded. A far better idea would be a career advice/job tips forum restricted to members like ARSE and HoS, but at the moment those occasions are rare enough that OT has served quite well.

And if we want to contrast a hypothetical engineering group to the Mess, the reason the Mess was founded was that the military people could discuss military life with people who know what it's like firsthand and to not have to deal with all the internet toughguy bullshit that routinely goes on in any military related threads. As well as not having to deal with faker wanna-bes, which we have had on the board, though thankfully just one 100% certain case to my knowledge. The circumstances around the Mess were and are significantly different than around almost any civilian profession precisely because of the bullshit military things tend to attract.

There's a smiley made specifically for this thread at this point: