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.