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Newbie support.




I'm sorry, but as obnoxious, degrading, insulting, and embarrassing
(did I miss any adjectives?) as Marc's flames can be, I really don't
think there's any other solution to "the newbie" problem.  Also, I
don't think they're necessarily unwarranted either (except for the
times when Marc was a little too trigger happy).

When someone uses a mailing list as his first source of information,
(i.e - asks simple and straight forward questions whose answers are
already in the FAQs, the HOWTOs, the man pages, the info pages, etc.),
they're already being *extremely* rude.  And I don't think that a rude
obnoxious response is completely uncalled for.

Why is doing this so rude?  What said individual is doing is writing
up a problem report, typically with minimal effort even to form a
careful and useful question, and giving it to 150 people to read and
answer.  This person is asking 150 other people to read his report,
and solve his problem for him, even though he's unwilling to work on
it himself!  He's unwilling to first read relevant documents, and to
try different approaches.  He's unwilling to even spend enough time
and effort to develop the understanding necessary to post an
intelligent question which includes all the relevant details.

This is extremely rude.  And if in response they get flamed, I'm not
so sure that they're actually getting degraded and embarrassed by the
flame.  Often they've already degraded and embarrassed themselves by
their thoughtless demands on other people's time.

One analogy is to consider someone sitting in a chair with a pitcher
of water next to them, and asking you if you could get up, walk over,
and pour them a glass of water.  That would be rude, presumptuous, and
obnoxious.  And I'm sure that response would sometimes be a pitcher of
water poured on the head.  And, if these sort of requests continued
regularly, you'd probably disassociate yourself from the requester.

However, on a mailing list, there's no way for the subscribers to
disassociate themselves from one thoughtless member, except by
unsubscribing.  There's no way to merely bar the thoughtless member.

More generally, the goal in general is to preserve the usefulness of a
mailing list.  This means keeping a high signal to noise ratio (i.e. -
preventing redundancy).

It's been my experience that the action most commonly degrading the
usefulness of mailing lists is:

     Individuals using it as their first source of information (i.e. -
     each simple and straight forward question of theirs gets asked on
     the list instead of by first consulting "help", "man", FAQs,
     and/or how-tos.

When there are individuals doing the above, what happens is that those
on the mailing list just keep seeing the same questions over and over
again, followed by a flood of the same answers over and over again.
And, as I mentioned, posing thoughtless questions as above is already
quite rude to begin with.

As lists grow, more and more individuals of this sort join, and
eventually the list becomes bogged down with the same questions
over and over again, asked by individuals effectively asking others to
do their own work.

Those with even a small amount of experience will eventually leave the
list because reading it becomes a waste of time.

This eventually causes the list to be merely a recycling of the same
questions endlessly repeated, with the same answers endlessly fired
off.

As a newbie support source, this isn't all that bad.  But the problem
is, how do you keep a list at a higher level?

One suggestion is to have two lists.  In our case that might be
linux-il-newbie and linux-il-guru.  I don't think this helps, because
individuals who fire off thoughtless questions would probably fire
their messages off to *both* lists!

Another suggestion is a linux-il newbie support network - a list of
email addresses from which newbies can get hand holding.  Although
you're welcome to try, I don't think this will work either, because in
all likelihood, people who fire off thoughtless questions would fire
them off to linux-il *as* *well* *as* all the newbie hand holders.

In general, I don't think you can do *anything* to prevent thoughtless
questions, *because* they're thoughtless questions!  By definition of
thoughtless question, the poser will *not* read anything or think
about it first, they will just go and fire it off!  And just asking
it is an imposition on every member of the mailing list!

We've already tried to reduce thoughtless questions by writing a FAQ
for linux-il subscribers detailing the purpose of the list, as well as
all the standard locations for useful helpful reading.  Maybe it's had
some effect, I don't know.  Maybe there would be tons more thoughtless
questions from the 150 subscribers if the FAQ hadn't been written.

I'm afraid that the only way to keep a list from being bogged down in
thoughtless common questions is by either
   1. not answering at all,
   2. answering merely RTFM and mentioning the relevent docs (btw - I
      hope you all know what the "F" in RTFM stands for, and it
      *isn't* "Fine").
   3. flaming those who ask them.

And, frankly, although it makes the list scary for newbies, the fact
of the matter is that
   1. flaming in response is often the most effective way to reduce
      the incidence of thoughtless questions, and
   2. posting to the list *should* be a little scary - it's no
      different than getting up in front of 150 people and making a
      statement.  You *should* be a little hesitant.  You *should*
      first think carefully about what you're going to say.  You
      *should* run a spell checker on your message. :).

But, as borik the Boris Yati Beletsky <borik@isracom.co.il> writes:

 > but i am crying  of pitty when i c , ppl  made along way :
 > d/l ALL linux
 > making a root/boot disk
 > installing it all on the hard disk 
 > and finaly after a good WEEK  of installing somthing , hell knows what ,
 > on there hard disk ( i personaly had to rm all the dos/windows stuff
 > leaving only notron and dos (200m) for TRYING somthing wiered called
 > "linux" :-\ ) booting it the first time from the hard disk and only then
 > try to ask a
 > simple q ( "how do i make this THING warking" ) 
 > get a verry simple answer on a verry simple q :
 > RTFM u f.. lammer
 > ("buahahahahaha")

There is a point to what he's saying.  Even when asking thoughtless,
mindless questions, people have still already done a sizable amount of
work getting linux and have already made a sizable commitment towards
getting it running and chucking DOS, so a certain amount of tolerance
should be given.

As a general guideline, I'd say that thoughtless questions should
initially get 1 line responses of the form "RTFM, namely ...., and
read the list's FAQ, available at ...".  I'd say that it's only the
repeated and recalcitrant offenders who deserve to be Marced.

Also, in support of this position, I'd like to point out that
   1. I was a newbie once too.  And, I have occasionally accidentally
      posted dumb questions, and I have also gotten flamed in
      response.  But, I always try *very* hard to solve the problem on
      my own before wasting other people's time on it, which is why
      I'm a guru now...
   2. Linux (and unix in general) is *not* for the unwashed masses.
      It's big, it's complicated, it requires study, and it *doesn't*
      install 1-2-3.  You have to be willing to be a little more
      sophisticated and work a little harder than you would with MS
      Windoze.
   3. Flaming has it's drawbacks too.  Although it often reduces the
      amount of noise on the list, it occasionally backfires, leading
      to a huge number of messages on the pros and cons of flaming,
      and even leading to people leaving the list.  At this point,
      it's not completely clear to me that the total amount of noise
      has been reduced.

Hence, I come to the position that we should use the flame, but only
as a last resort, when all other lines of attack have been exhausted
(namely, RTFM pointers, and silence).

Unfortunately, I'm afraid that this won't really reduce the amount of
noise either, because if someone still doesn't get the hint after RTFM
pointers and after being ignored, then he's probably so recalcitrant
that he's not going to go away after being flamed either.  More
likely, the flame will be the start of a flamefest, leading to much
burning mail for all.

Oh well, such is life on the net...

-- 
Dr. Harvey J. Stein             "The only stupid question is the one that
Berger Financial Research       goes unasked".  Naaa, they only said that
abel@netvision.net.il           in school to flush out the dumb ones...





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