Well, THIS is a summary...
I think you hit the nail on the head about both the forum and the issues with MikroTik’s documentation.
What is missing is proper onboarding for newcomers, and by “newcomer” I mean both absolute beginners and experienced users who are new to RouterOS. Good onboarding should be short, structured, and clear enough to give people a mental map of how RouterOS is built and how its different parts fit together.
The current documentation often feels like it is trying to give a newcomer a tour of the entire MikroTik ecosystem at once: high-level concepts, low-level details, examples, references, and sometimes rather vague wording all mixed together.
For example, take the Introduction section that eventually leads new readers to the CLI Reference. In my opinion, that page is almost unusable for someone who has not already read and understood the scripting documentation.
The CLI Reference is intended to act as a reference document (albeit not complete yet), but it is surely not an onboarding document. New users first need an overview of how RouterOS is structured, how the CLI is organized, how configuration objects relate to each other, and how the different subsystems interact.
In short, manual.mikrotik.com is primarily a Reference Manual, but from time to time it tries to act as a User Guide. Unfortunately, it does so in a pretty unstructured way, which can leave newcomers confused about where to start and what they are expected to understand before moving on to the next section.
IMO, a concise “RouterOS Architecture and Concepts” Guide would probably help new users far more than expanding the existing reference material.
That is exactly to the point.
- not everybody here has English as a mother tongue. Mine is German and it might be somewhat difficult for me to write in the technicalese of many American "experts".
- I am 78 years old, and I am proud that I am still able to set up such a system. I am not new at IT, but totally new at a router OS.
- It might be worth while to establish different forums for the experts and "router newbies", where nobody should be afraid of posting questions showing a lack of knowledge.
- General comments like "that has already been posted in 2019 - why don't you look that up instead of posting dumb questions" are also not very helpful.(I didn't say that anybody did this here, but unfortunately that is quite common in thechnical forums)
You'd be surprised to learn most here are not native English speaking.