Re: [exim] Why is this list so abusive?

On 24/04/06, Jason Meers <Jason.Meers@???> wrote:
>
>
> Question?
>
> Are we saying that providing a reference (with or without the F word) is
> preferred over providing a more detailed answer because it's
> counter-productive and doesn't "teach a man to fish"?
>
> I think I'm helping someone when I solve their problem, and wonder why
> other people who no the answer don't provide it.
>
> This is a genuine question not a sarcastic comment.
>
> And a very good question actually. My personal opinion is that it's better
to try to teach people how to solve their own problems. Pointing people at
the right place to look is, to me, a very good thing. Also, giving people
pointers to means of debugging what is going on is also a good idea in my
opinion. Of course, if people then come back and say:
" I got this output, but I'm entirely sure what it means."
then walking them though the output explaining it is yet another way to
hopefully give them the skills necessary to do this on their own and is not
something I would object to doing. I must admit to my bias towards helping
people who seem to be prepared to help themselves. Perhaps it was too many
homework questions posted to discussion forums that made me like that :)
That's not to say that providing a detailed answer is in any way a bad
thing. There are many occasions I can think of (complicated lookup
conditions spring immediately to mind) where providing a chunk of config is
probably all I would do. The person has shown that they know the gist of
what they're trying to - pointing them at the manual is not going to achieve
much.
One slightly controversial point I will raise is the one that there is
nobody on this list who is obligated to give their help. The one thing I do
find offensive is anyone demanding that their problem is solved NOW NOW NOW
! You can make those kinds of demands when you're paying me. Fortunately,
this list is thankfully devoid of such demands.
This is turning into quite an interesting thread about the psychology of
'communities' such as this one. It's interesting to see what people expect.
I would be interested to see the correlation between what people expect and
their degree of exposure to such online communities. I've been hanging
around these sort of things for more years than I care to admit. I'm from
the old days where being told to RTFM was quite often all you would get.
Yes, it was correct - the information was in the documentation. The trick
was finding the docs to begin with.
J