You and I both know, Charlie, from this group and especially from CF-Talk that there are ways to do "encouraging education" and then there are ways
to commit "discouraging education." It's all in the tone of the reply. Personally, I think it's time for jQuery to take the route of CF-Talk and begin a jQuery beginners list, as well. It's hard for one list to serve the needs of such a wide range of experience and competence. Experienced users get frustrated with repeated basic questions, and beginners get frustrated with the lack of understanding and patience with their needs. If there is a list for "jQuery-Newbies-en"., then anyone who signs up for that list knows what kind of interaction and questions to expect. For jQuery to survive and thrive in the long-run, the community must make beginners feel welcome. Even using the resources of a community, such as the docs, takes some time for beginners to figure out and understand. Especially since the docs have been a little sketchy on explanation and helping someone brand new to concepts understand the implications and what's written "between the lines of code." So, bring on the new "jQuery-Newbies-en" list! Rick From: jquery-en@googlegroups.com [mailto:jquery...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Charlie Griefer Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 2009 11:33 AM To: jquery-en@googlegroups.com Subject: [jQuery] Re: In this code, what would $(this) in the success part refer to? but educating someone in how to ask a good question really -is- helping them :) http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 4:24 AM, donb <falconwatc...@comcast.net> wrote: I don't know what can be more discouraging that the standard 'use google' or 'that question has been asked/answered too many times' discussion. Folks, this is a discussion forum. People range from novice to expert. The experts eventually get tired of answering a novice question and get testy about it. And it invariable degrades into name-calling. Besides, searching for 'this' will be a futile exercise because the word is just too common.. Searching is only going to be successful when you can formulate a good search query. But as pointed out, there usually are a bunch of 'answers' that may be misleading, create further questions, are just wrong, or they may appear to be nonapplicable for some reason. Even when the answer is found, it may not be recognized. The documentation is not perfect and I find the examples are often quite trivial and sometimes ambiguous. And often we have people whose primary language is not English and they may struggle (or fail) to translate those answers into their own language. (Yes, I know this is the jQuery- English forum) There's no need to lecture anyone on 'proper' use of the forum, particularly when the lecture/lecturer also goes contrary to decent and/or proper use of the forum. As has been shown above, the effort it takes to lecture typically far exceeds the effort it takes to assist. Still a good motto: 'if you can't say something nice then don't say anything at all.' -- I have failed as much as I have succeeded. But I love my life. I love my wife. And I wish you my kind of success.
