Any newbie Linux forums 4047

On Wed, 13 Jul 2005 18:40:01 -0500, jeff

Dances With Crows is one of the "many posters to this newsgroup who are both very knowledgeable, and also pleasant to deal with", as you put it. I have never seen him offer less than very relevant advice or post unpleasantness. This newsgroup would benefit if every answerer followed the practices you and he and Tony Lawrence advocate. It would also benefit if cross-posting trolls were eliminated or totally ignored, but that's a different issue.

Michael chickene's interpretation of why some posters who respond unpleasantly feel the way they do might be true. There are probably other different reasons for each person that have more to do with their personality or life circumstances than their experiences on the newsgroup.

In a moderated group it is easy to ensure that the posts serve the group. In this public, unmoderated group, it should only be a matter of conveying the reasoning preached by yourself, D.W.C, Tony Lawrence and many others to ensure that the posts serve the group. But it's not, because not all posters are motivated by what is best for the group. People's posting motivations vary from knowledge sharing to trolling - all levels from selfless to ego-driven.

Ego-driven posters are often good for the group because their ego thrives on providing the very best information. But where someone's ego drives them to unpleasantness (even if they solve problems) they're plainly putting themselves before the group.

We may be unimpressed, but changing the posting behaviour of a person on the other side of the world who frankly doesn't give a toss about what we have to say is challenging.

So what's my point? Yes, I think your atbreastude is the most reasonable. No, it's not even faintly likely that we will convey that atbreastude to all of the posters in this newsgroup, because despite the subject matter of this group, reason is far from the prime driver of its posters, who are, after all, human.