From: G DOT DegliEsposti AT ads DOT it
To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Message-ID: <C12565A8.003DA24B.00@vega.ads.it>
Date: Wed, 11 Feb 1998 13:02:06 +0100
Subject: docs and ng posting (Was: Re: Newbie question, newbie error)
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This is partly off topic but I think it is important:

>On Tue, 10 Feb 1998, Robb Beggs wrote:
>
>> side note: If a question is frequent yet covered in the readme and the
faq,
>> can the problem possibly lie somewhere other than people not reading the
>> documentation.
>
>One wild hypothesis would be that people don't read the docs very
>well.  It is so much easier to post a two-liner and let others do the
>hard work, especially with all those friendly souls here!
>Unfortunately, I have a body of evidence which is large enough to back
>that hypothesis.
This is true, but not completely. There are different kinds of people
posting questions on the newsgroup:

Of course there are people who ask "how do I install djgpp" because they
are too
lazy to read even the "readme.1st" file.
Other ask "how can I get the reminder in division of two numbers" because
they
are too lazy to read any C programming book. (then there are the "void
main()"
people but that is another story ;-)

But these people exist in every newsgroup, it is not possible to get rid of
them. You can just learn to live with them. You must reply to them
otherwise
they will think you are not polite, but it is not necessary to give them
what they can get by themself.

There are, conversely, many people who *read* the docs but *are not able*
to find
what they need. This can be because the people who write have often very
different
ways of reasoning from people who read, or semply because they could not
join
the different pieces together. After all we are not compilers and we do not
retain
everything we read if it is not put down in some convenient way.

Of course these people post questions that seem silly for the more
experienced, but
this does not mean they are lazy.

Anyway I think it is unfair to say "It is so much easier to post a
two-liner and
let others do the hard work, especially with all those friendly souls
here!"
because this is applicable only to some of the postings.

In these cases it is possible to say "it is explained in readme.1st" or
"please,
this is not djgpp specific, ask in comp.lang.c".

Sometimes the few time we spend to reply to other's questions means much
time
they could spend digging inside long doc files, downloading more packages,
learning how to use them and so on. If you are doing this for fun then
it is not a problem (it is part of the fun, after all) but it is not funny
if
you are doing this for work.

According to my personal experience, posting these "two liners" has saved
to
mu much time and replying to them has saved much time to other people.

Of course I understand that people like Eli, John, Nate, SET, Shawn and
other who
give most of the replies can get tired of spendig so much time to reply to
these
lazy people, but there are replies that everyone here could give... maybe
we all
here should start replying the "easy questions" and let the "hard ones" to
them :-)

just my 35 Lire (it is about 2 cents :-)

>> Obviously, it can, and I suggestions are out there to combat this.
>
>If you have specific suggestions on how to let the existing knowledge
>more accessible to users, please go ahead and tell what do you
>suggest.  Personally, I invest a lot of effort into making the FAQ
>more easily searchable, but I'm always looking for better ideas.

Well, personally I found what I wanted everytime I looked at the FAQs, so
I don't know how to suggest... maybe it could be useful some sort of index
of keywords ?

ciao
  Giacomo