On Tue, Jun 25, 2013 at 12:36 AM, Robert Holtzman <hol...@cox.net> wrote:
> At the risk of raising everyones ire, there are times, especially with a
> really basic question and no indication of any effort on the poster's
> part, reply by asking what research has been done, what has been tried,
> and what were the error messages. Sometimes I will supply the url about
> asking smart questions (don't have it at hand).

I assume you mean this one:
http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

> I'm on a list that has one of these people. He asks one basic question
> after another, usually of the form "how do I ..." The thing that gets me
> is that many people on the list trip over each other to hold this guy's
> hand. No one suggests that he put out *some* effort to find answers. I'm
> about to, which will bring down the wrath of the posters, but that's the
> way it goes.

If there's people willing to trip over each other answering the guy's
questions there's really no reason to do anything at all I think - if
a question has been answered satisfactorily just leave it alone.
Eventually, if or when people get tired of being a particular person's
personal answering service that person will have to learn to find his
own answers anyways.  Threads like these just generate more noise.  To
be honest, I find the stackexchange / stackoverflow.com method of
getting answers to questions far superior to mailing lists anyways -
much greater search visiblity, and none of these problems - duplicate
questions simply get merged or closed when discovered.

Reply via email to