Any newbie Linux forums 4048

On Wed, 13 Jul 2005 13:47:54 -0400, Michael W chickene staggered into the Black Sun and said:

Mike has just described the syndrome that affects almost all clued people who do tech support. The urge to call a stupid user a stupid user is (sometimes) hard to suppress when you're not getting paid to be nice or supervised or anything.

So... how about this? If you can't help at all, don't post. If you can help, but you also want to draw attention to something stupid that a user's doing, put the "You stupid user!" part at the *end* of the message. When telling a newbie about nettiquette, a "please" usually makes the newbie more willing to listen and modify his behavior. (People also tend to go ballistic when you point out that they write like meth-addled 10-year-olds, even if they *do* write so poorly it's impossible to figure out what they meant, so don't do that.)

This is sort of the "Know your Grumpy Guru" thing. Points A and B are also covered by the Smart Questions FAQ, which lots of people (and the twice-weekly FAQ) tend to point out to people.

Some people don't know that groups.google exists. Some people haven't figured out the "lurk for several days before you post" idea. Some people think their time is more important than other people's time-- only the last is really worthy of a "STFU N00B!"-type response.

It's not as bad as all that. People who post inaccurate info tend to get swarmed by more knowledgeable people--at least that's what's mostly happened so far. People come, people go; that's what happens in any community.

-- Matt GThere is no Darkness in Eternity-But only Light too dim for us to see Brainbench MVP for Linux Admin mail: TRAP + SPAN don't belong ----------------------------- This space sort of for rent.