On Friday 10 February 2006 19:29, Rony Bill wrote:
- If a member asks for a solution that requires him/her to refer to the
manual, instead of saying "rtfm" or "Ever heard of google" or "Don't you have access to google", he is simply given another preset phrase " This problem can be solved by refering to the manual and even searching google for it. If you still face problems, then please post a report on what you did so far and at what point are you facing problems".
I would also add some link to the documentation if I know it. Some people want to read the documentation, but they're just not good at finding it.
I had this incident in the #linux-india channel, where I asked for the time of that Mark Shuttleworth's meet. Some fellow asked me to Google for it, even when he knew the time. Moreover commenting that I should learn to find stuff myself. I wonder.. why is it a problem to answer such a simple query as that than to make me spend some time Googling for a perfectly simple answer available at hand?
Look at it this way. Say some person asks a question to which you know the answer. But you tell him to read the documentation instead. The person should have read the documentation first, true, but when he can find the answer much easily, why should he be made to go the long way? In a way, doesn't this list act as a source of documentation? I mean, answer the question if you can and also point him to the documentation for future reference. If after that he still asks some stupid question, ignoring the documentation, then he deserves to be flamed!
This is not technical support I guess, but then again, what's the objective of the list? To tell people to RTFM all the time and end up having flame wars? Does this list exist just to discuss the timing and the location of the next LUG meet?
What I observed here is that some members do not have time to post solutions to the problems asked but they have a lot of time to go on and on with flame messages. Sometimes most posts are focussed on flames rather than technical information. Half or quarter of the time and web space spent on endless flaming can be spent on providing information and close the chapter.
Exactly what I mean!
Mrugesh