Why is it posts are often never fully answered, even when you're trying your best to answer people's questions in the comments?

Question

I mean, it seems like the people who you expect will see you through until you find the answer seem to simply abandon your issue altogether. My recent post on the Arduino site isn't making any progress whatsoever. I need help setting up my Arduino Uno with the port

The same exact thing happened with a Stack Overflow question I had a long time ago. Like, what happens first is they point out how incoherent my explanation is and when I finally elaborate, nobody says a peep. Is there anything I can do so this doesn't happen?

Answer 1

I will talk for myself: You have a Windows problem, not an Arduino problem.

I'm a volunteer. I'm here just for the fun, to learn from others and give a piece of advice when I can. I work in problems that looks interesting, demanding, challenging.

Solving Windows problems is the definition of unfunny.

I dropped Windows many years ago and switched to Linux. Best decision.

Answer 2

Questions about "why doesn't the serial port appear" are very specific to your setup. For me, for example, I don't have Windows 8 on any computer. I have Windows XP for legacy work and Windows 10 for more modern stuff. I also have OS/X and Ubuntu.

For a USB device to appear, it often needs a device driver installed. It's hard to even start to advise without having your operating system to hand (ie. Windows 8) so I (or others) can take screenshots.

There can be a similar response to questions like "I have the Arduino Micro and the Acme accelerometer, which works in the morning but not the afternoon". To answer that sort of question we have to be able to reproduce it. It's easier to answer programming questions, or hardware questions, because they can be more easily reproduced.

Answer 3

Questions of the style you have posted cannot be answered with a simple "This is your problem, here is the solution". It's a question of troubleshooting.

There are a number of logical steps that we have to walk you through trying and checking different things to rule them out - there's a million and one possible reasons for your specific problem. Only once we have actually identified and cured your problem, which can only really be done in comments or in chat, can we post an answer that has a chance of being tagged as correct.

Any answers that just consist of "Try this and get back to us" are really only comments and not answers and should (IMGO) be converted to comments anyway.

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I have set up a community wiki FAQ question with troubleshooting steps:

• My Arduino isn't showing up on my computer. What should I do?

Can people contribute to the CW answer in it and improve it? I'm not a windows user, so can't flesh out some of the more complex steps.