Re: minoru hodo koube wo tareru inahokana

[Jonathan Q <jq@example.com>]

roylo (roylo@example.com) wrote:

> When people see someone make a careless [dumb] comment, they can choice to
> make a friendly suggestion,  ignore it, make fun of it, or criticize it.

You'll find there is a lot more tolerance here for dumb questions
(as opposed to inexperienced beginner questions, which are totally
OK) than there is for dumb answers.  The philosophy on a lot
of tech lists (not just this one) that values not saying something
that doesn't do anything to solve the problem, and especially
not saying something that's 100% unhelpful. The only thing worse
is giving somebody an actual wrong answer/bad information about
their problem.

TLUG is perhaps more straightforward about saying that than
many lists are.  If I came up with something really stupid, I
would fully expect someone to say it was.  The atmosphere may
sometimes seem a bit harsh to newcomers, but most of this have been
on this list for a long time (almost four years for me, and others
have been around even longer), but it seems to work.  Maybe it's
a bit harsher than it once was, but we've had some really severe
signal:noise ratio problems in the past, and this has probably
led some of us who've been around here for a while to be rather
short-fused about things like that.  Plus, it's just the way we
are :-)

> Of course there are people who will tell everyone to "RTFM" on everything;
> and there are people who are willing help out others.

Believe me, telling someone "RTFM" is helping them out.  A lot. 
Particularly because at the times RTFM is used, either that way or
in some politer form, it's usually because it's pretty obvious the
poster has not read the manual or they wouldn't be asking that 
question in the first place.  People on TLUG and throughout the
wider Linux community place a lot of value on the idea of helping
yourself first.  That means you read the documentation, try to make
it work, if you have a problem or don't understand something, then
get on your favorite list, explain the goal, the problems you are
having achieving it, and what you have done so far to solve those problems.
You'll find the repsonses are both larger in number and more helpful and
detailed.  The more information you give, the more people can help you.

If a person is totally lost and doesn't even *know* what the proper
documentation or tool for what they want to do is (which happens to
lots of people when they are starting out, including me) they can
post a message and say "I need to do X, but don't know how to do it/
what to use.  Can anybody tell me where to find some tools and/or
documentation to do this?" if someone knows what you need and where to
find it, you can be pretty sure of getting an answer and possibly even
a quick rundown of what it does/how it works.

> I believe most people on this mail list are the ones that wants to help

Everyone on this list wants to help others, not just most people.
Sometimes telling someone not to say dumb things that are totally
useless to the recipient (heck, the guy already knew the dsl problem
was with Linux, he said so in his initial post) is helping them.
Simon is one of the most helpful and knowledgeable people on this
list, and has helped many people with many things on many occasions.
He has helped me on a number of occasions, and if he told me that my
answer was the stupidest thing he'd ever heard, I would go back and
take a good look at what I'd written, because the odds are pretty good
he would be right.


Jonathan