[plug] hello

[Craig Ringer]

On Thu, 2004-03-18 at 07:33, Shayne O'Neill wrote:

> I really apreciate plugs newbie-friendlyness. Back in the bad old days
> when I was moving from minix to slackware , my requests for help from
> various quarters tended to cop a "RTFM d-head" sort of response.
> I never understood it. Personally helping a newbie strokes my ego :)

I guess. It depends a lot on the attitude of said newbie. I'll spend an
hour or more researching and writing a detailed answer to a question if
the person shows that they've made some effort to look it up first, or
otherwise /tried/ to do something. Hell, even saying "I don't know where
to start" is OK. What I /hate/ is "hey, this thing sucks, it doesn't
work. Someone tell me how to make it go." I see this a bit on the Cyrus
IMAPd list (Cyrus has _really_ bad documentation, unfortunately).

It really comes down to whether or not the person asking the question is
implying that they have a flat right to demand your time and effort,
without acknowledging that you're doing this in your own free (*lol*)
time, for your own reasons.  I don't see it as 'ego' so much as that I
like to be able to be helpful, I learn things along the way myself, and
it's a sort of reverse payback for the help I'll inevitably always need
to ask of someone more knowledgeable than I.

> Never saw newbie directed agro on plug thank god.

I feel it sometimes, usually in the form of "oh, RTFA! I spent two hours
helping someone through this YESTERDAY" or "It's in the f**ing
installation manual on the CD."... but it's just not helpful to flame
someone. I usually solve it be saying silent and letting others who are
feeling more patient that day handle things ;-) . I've definitely been
very /brisk/ with people before, though. 

A quick pointer to TFM is also much more helpful than a flat "RFTM" to
someone who doesn't know there is a FM, doesn't know where TFM might be,
and in fact possibly doesn't know what they needing to be reading TFM
of, or even that the subject even exists. It's often very like saying
"RTFM" to someone who is sitting at the $ prompt, having typed 'help'
and got:

[craig at albert ~]$ help
help: Command not found.
[craig at albert ~]$ ?
?: No match.

(Fire up tcsh, csh, bourne shell, ash, or basically anything else but
bash and maybe zsh and you'll see what I mean. It astonishes me that
most UNIXES don't have a '/bin/help' that prints a 'where to go for
info' summary.)

A more useful answer also usually prevents reposts (well, forwards and
re-forwards - *sigh*) to the list every few hours, and screaming
frustration by all. It's when pointers to the answer are provided and
subsequently _ignored_ by the person asking the question that I tend to
go abruptly silent.

To be honest, I think one of the reasons PLUG tends to be a bit more
newbie-friendly is that there's enough other discussion going on that
the list doesn't feel like "free tech support central". Perhaps it's
something to do with being a local list rather than a 'global' list
dedicated to a particular project/topic. The folks here do seem more
tolerant, too - you've all endured me for a long time now, after all ;-)

Craig Ringer