If you ever figure this out user experience folks everywhere will literally throw cash at you. Really. Let me know if you find the secret sauceā¦ I like money. 
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Youāre mixing me up with another person. I have not linked anything here other than the code of conduct and the FAQ. Iāve been partaking in this thread before you joined and I had supplied an answer in your other thread. Iām not following you around. I just know the context behind your post because I replied in the other thread.
For what itās worth, youāve been the topic of conversation in the moderators chat. It seems you behave like this on a regular basis. This forum might not be the right place for you if youāre unwilling to take any feedback from other users without starting an argument.
Weāve gone through your history, this is a specific problem with the way you talk with people. If this was an isolated event, you wouldnāt have garnered the response from 3 separate moderators.
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I actually tried this, but I found that there were too many branching paths. Iād start out reading up on one topic and then find that I needed to keep going backwards and forwards between other pages just to understand what was being said on the original page.
What might help would be to have little info boxes, or popups, that explained key words or phrases, which were repeated throughout the documentation even if it meant saying the exact same thing on multiple pages.
some kind of compromise is needed. But what i donāt know.
Thatās not an easy question to answer, I feel that a lot of the documentation reads like glossary of features rather than an instruction manual. As you said, we canāt possibly have documents that cover all possible situations and their solutions, but some simpler explanations or language geared more towards the layman amight help.
For example
The easiest option to edit
configuration.yamlis to use the Studio Code Server add-on. This add-on runs VS Code, which offers live syntax checking and auto-fill of various Home Assistant entities.
For 98% of the population, this says a lot yet very little, and this is one of the most crucial parts of this particular document for a new user because it tells them where there need to go to do the thing that they want to do.
It might be easier just to have a couple of pictures saying Click here, here and here to open.
I know that most people here have some kind of technical background or knowledge, but a lot of people in the world at large come form an environment where everything is a black box with an app for an interface. Simply having to access a text based editor is new and confusing, so having instructions that are geared for technical people will either make them quit or flee to the forum.
I wouldnāt go that far. But reading what I could understand and skipping the bits I couldnāt got me a long way in the beginning. Then it was just a lot of time spent looking through all the integrations to see what I could use.
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The glossary needs to be more prominent, pretty much everyone skips that. It should be the first pit stop when reading the documents.
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That is why they are marked as āExpertā or āRegularā. They have proven to be knowledgeable and try to help wherever.
It was also my main reason to start this topic, as people tend to:
- not search for answers
- donāt read any documentation
- ask the same questions over and over
- not listen to advice
- have a complete misunderstanding on how it was designed to work
Which very often gets tiring and demotivating.
In your case, you figured you know how it should work, and work from that point.
But when you get stuck, and ask for help, you refuse to accept that your starting point was wrong to begin with.
People try to convince you politely that there are more appropriate waysā¦but you insist yours must work.
I just wonder, why ask for advice then, if you are convinced you are on the right track 
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Letās please move on from this. Itās not going anywhere and repeated comments arenāt landing. They arenāt interested in changing over to a different approach. If needed, Iāll remove all the posts related to this to curb the conversation. Thanks.
Very good point. Nearly every device you buy nowadays has a āQuick startā¦ā guide. There are quite a lot of pages like this in the docs, but they donāt stand out from the others. Maybe something as simple as a different colour heading would help?
Another good idea.
Iām not following you around.
You saw that Iād commented and raised the topic even though itās unrelated. How would you feel if I did this to you?
It seems you behave like this on a regular basis.
My crime seems to continue to ask for help after the first person tells me to give up.
This forum might not be the right place for you if youāre unwilling to take any feedback from other users without starting an argument.
People are too wedded to their āfeedbackā. If you read the threads in question youāll see that I repeatedly did accept the feedback, but continued talking to other people about the issue rather than simply taking the first suggestion that came along as the answer.
Iām trying to engage with this thread in a constructive manner, and the only argument thatās going on is because someone else tried to continue an argument form a different thread because they were angry that I didnāt take their advice, and you waded in.
Iāll ask you this, would I be involved in any conflict on this thread if someone else hadnāt brought up a previous conflict on a totally unrelated subject?
Do you think that anything that youāre saying here is helping this thread to move forward in any way, or are you simply getting involved because of something that happened somewhere else?
Iām getting involved because Iām a moderator and I have almost 9 years experience using HA. People are not set in their ways in regards to your question. Scripts were literally designed to do what you are trying to do. Literally. Iāve been around long enough to be involved with many of the original intentions for HA and itās functionality.
So please, do not defend yourself from my remarks here. Just move on at this point. No action will be taken by moderators and we will all just move on. You donāt need to employ scripts, you can go about using automation.trigger to your hearts content.
Let this conversation end with this post.
Thank you.
From my own perspective, Iād go for a āshow, donāt tellā approach. Maybe more screenshots. Also, a glossary on each page of the key term?
I like the idea of a quick start guide, but Iām not sure how to go about writing one or when youād stop helping people to start. One of HAās greatest strengths is that itās so customisable, but as was said earlier we canāt write a guide to cover everything possible permutation.
I think that a lot of the repetition in questions that the forum is getting is probably due to people with a slightly different permutation or combination asking a question thatās specific to them because theyāve become overwhelmed by the sheer amount of content available thatās close to what they want, but not exactly.
A little while back I wanted to create a panel of scheduled events with switches to enable or disable them manually. So I looked up how to set up an alarm clock in HA because I reasoned that if you wanted have a system that controlled timed events an alarm clock might be a good place to start. I found that there were already a dozen threads on the topic, with dozens of users doing things slightly differently and within those threads were hundreds of samples of code. Some of which had errors in them or prerequisites that were mentioned in posts that I hadnāt read.
It was a chore to sort out what was what, and that was on something relatively simple. Iād have no idea how to get to any of those answers from the documentation.
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This ones easy. Curriculum and Instruction 101. Treat it like a Continuing Ed class. List. Out the concept you need to get across, like how to trigger an action from a button on the dashboard. Or how to setup motion lights. Work backwards from that. What skills do we need to make it work and how do we demo or model that. Work backwards from there (youāre building whatās called thee scaffolding)
The lesson plan is just working that ladder in reverse building the how to content. But the key is you start with where you need to end.
For your specific questions weād just have to decide on whatās the MINIMUM someone needs to know to be successful with HA. And the. Work the exercises above. (yes itās not quite as easy as iake it sound but thatās basically the process). Yes I trained as an educatorā¦ 
Edit. The other key is youād have to put all advanced install mechanisms out of scope. If youāre learning basics. Itās HAOS. Iām not teaching you to be a Linux admin.
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weād just have to decide on whatās the MINIMUM someone needs to know to be successful with HA.
Beyond instructions on how to install HA, Iām not even sure what would be considered the minimum. For me, the minimum was controlling lights, getting feedback from binary sensors, and taking snapshots from CCTV, but to do that I needed to know how to send SMTP messages, and how to use the CURL function, and webhooks, and before I could do any of that I needed to know how do write the syntax.
Most of which I had no idea tat Iād need to know when I started because I was used to having a little black box in the corner that I installed apps on that did most of what I wanted in a way that someone else thought that people like me might want to do it.
If I had to concentrate on one thing, Iād probably ask for some really really really good teaching material explaining how to use the GUI to make automations for common things. Maybe how to trigger an automation from a binary sensors or a timer, and how to call a service to do something like turning on a light or sending a notification?
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Hmmā¦ personally I donāt ike that mentality; i get the āmonkey see, monkey doā idea.
Iād rather explain and try to make understand people how it works and why it works in that way.
Once someone understands how it works, you will never forget it
Give a man a bread and his hunger problem is solved for a day.
Teach a man how to grow grain and wonāt be hungry anymore
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Indeed. I like the pages about Automations in the Docs. They start very general and if you follow the links the information gets more and more detailed, so you can go as far as you want to (and end up in templating if youāre interested in that).
It would be helpful if pages like this were flagged up in some way, or indexed. Someone has been trying to do this, but as usual you need to know the correct search term before you can find for anything.
https://jackjourneyman.github.io/homeassistantindex/index.html
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Without wanting to look like Iām trying to get the last word in, perhaps you could see your way to having a quiet DM with people who are posting links unrelated threads that Iāve participate in in order to continue old arguments in new places?
If I were to post links to your comments here on unrelated threads Iām sure that you wouldnāt be happy about it.
If you do need those you made a poor decision on your hardwareā¦ you really donāt need to know SMTP, CURL nor WebHooks to achieve what you want (controlling lights, getting feedback from binary sensors, and taking snapshots from CCTV)
I do all of that without using SMTP, CURL (Iād rather wouldnāt but I do use a webhook though but only because of a bad choice in hardware )
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This one Iām attacking separately because where I used to work we had policy around this (it was a professional support org. We had policy for all kinds of things)
First we would always define the problem weāre trying to solve up front. One question that can be resolved yes or no. (ever see my first response to many on the forum - Iām trying to squeeze down to this - the problem statement). This kept techs out of neverending problem hell.
In solving the problem we would never:
Touch the client keys (liability)
Provide working finished code (forces the end user to interact to make it work)
Provide an opinion on on a technique not backed by a probable point (provide reference)
Read out the document to the client (i can absolutely show you where it is and summarize but I will ask you to find the content yourself and read it. - trust me I read it before I sent it. The answer is there if I sent you a link)
Because doing those things donāt teach and the client didnāt understand the why.
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Youāre welcome to flag any posts you deem inappropriate or off-topic.
Could you add these two to "How to help us to help them? 
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