I understand that after so many posts a user is automatically designated a "Senior member".

Unfortunately this means that someone can have that title and have no idea what they're talking about, and many noobies wont know the difference.

Is there any way to correlate "Senior Member" status with "Thanked posts" or some other metric of experience? It would be extremely helpful to look under a name and get an idea of whether the person offering advice is speaking from years of experience or just learned to use "Comparator" and "Op Amp" in a sentence.

Just a thought.

 

If you stick around long enough you quickly learn who is using fuzzy logic and who is well grounded.

Besides someone who gives bad advice will be quickly set straight. This forum is self moderating in that sense.

 

There is no way to assess a member's expertise in an automated way. Even within electronics, there are vast divergences between fields; one may be an expert in electric motors but a complete dufus in RF technology (I 'm exaggerating a bit, of course).

What we do have is an abundance of members eager to correct others so, in that sense, you are covered.

 

There are a number of potential metrics, but none of them is very good. Using number of thanked posts is one obvious one that comes to mind, but as you look through the forums you will see that many posts get thanked for no good reason and you will also see that it is entirely possible for the majority of a person's thanked posts to be in the Off-Topic forum, which makes metrics such as the percentage of their posted that have been thanked dubious because the thanks get counted but the post itself does not.

As already pointed out, you will quickly get a feel for who is worth listening to and who is worth ignoring (though actually ignoring them can be easier said than done). You will also realize that you can make a pretty good judgement of most newcomers from just their few few posts -- much faster than any automated metric could produce anything meaningful.

One useful thing to do is when you run across a poster that you want to get a feel for, just bring up the list of their posts (by right clicking their name in the post header) and skim through their last several posts.

 

If you stick around long enough you quickly learn who is using fuzzy logic and who is well grounded.

Besides someone who gives bad advice will be quickly set straight. This forum is self moderating in that sense.

I'm a very good example of the above. BUT by making suggestions and being corrected when wrong, we all learn in the end. And that is what makes AAC the greatest electronics site on the web.

 

BUT by making suggestions and being corrected when wrong, we all learn in the end.

It is those who are persistent with following the rules and those questioners who are persistent which make this site what it is. There are plenty of questioners who are here just for the answer to the assignment du jour.

It doesn't take long for anyone to figure out what is what.