A Common Problem

Just about anyone who's used Avid before will know that all support queries and error message searches lead back to the Avid Community forum.

This is sometimes all you need to be able to fix your problem (even if the answer usually involves hours of work attempting to find a single corrupted audio file). More often, however, this occurs:

 

from xkcd

For those of you unfamiliar with xkcd (why? how?!) a great feature is the image alt text, accessible by hovering over the image on their website - or via an app on iOS. And it was the alt text which really made me think of the Avid Community:

 

"All long help threads should have a sticky globally-editable post at the top saying 'DEAR PEOPLE FROM THE FUTURE: Here's what we've figured out so far ...'"

 

Beautiful advice, and also potentially circumnavigating the existing dilema of whether to dredge up a 3 year old thread, start a new thread even though nobody knew the answer last time, or just try to get on with it yourself since nobody knew last time - and if they did figure it out then they're not the sort of person to update the old thread in which nobody else seems to have had the same problem over the last 3 years.