optimistx said:
Richard Cornford wrote:
...
...
Good question
.
I stated the obvious fact that if people are supposed to spend
many hours of their time before their first posting, then many
of them do not spend.
Observing that people may not always do what they should do was not all
you did, you also implied that their behaviour should be acceptable, and
so be consequence-free. As it is not you will have done harm to anyone
who takes you seriously and indeed those who choose to do as they
should, as the time needlessly squandered by the others will not be
available to the deserving.
A cure would be to have a condensed short part of FAQ, which
would list the absolute minimim requirements for an acceptable
post.
You haven't actually read the FAQ, have you? But in any event, a
formulation of words that sufficiently concisely explains the situation
is difficult to devise, and people are more likely to follow conventions
and advice when they understand why, which takes explanation and so
consequently time to study that explanation.
... . If a person presents a question breaking those requirements
the old experienced js-experts could leave the post unanswered,
instead of writing detailed, conscise, unfriendly harsh remarks.
'You break our rules, go away'.
Precisely how many people have you seen telling others to go away? One
or two at best, and it is a meaningless proposal as this is an
unmediated, publicly accessible group. The most prevalent reaction to
recalcitrant disregarders of the conventions is to silently ignore them,
and you see plenty of evidence of that where top-posters and those who
will not quote appropriately are left to suffer each other's dubious
advice. And indeed here, where a subject that has resulted in worthwhile
debate in the past is passed over by at least half a dozen with
well-formed and interesting opinions on the subject.
The more the js-experts spend their time here the more
frustrated they get during the years. The reason is simple:
the portion of problems which are interesting, educational
and enough high quality for their own personal developement
goes asymptotically towards zero. Have you noticed that?
Not at all, the people who were trying to be interested and helpful when
they started posting to the group still seem just as keen to be
interested and helpful now, they (with the obvious exception) just tend
to be more knowledgeable and experienced now. The only apparent sources
of frustration are the number of times it is necessary to repeat the
same advice; such as explaining to people why "it doesn't work" is not
much good as an error report. It makes you wish someone would write
these things down and put them on the Internet so that it was not
necessary to repeat them ad infinitum, but that only saves everyone
effort if you can get people to go and read the material they are
referred to.
If the overall quality of the groups needs to be advanced,
why not make a new group 'advanced javascript' or 'newbie
javascript'?
And how is that supposed to work? A group of people who don't really
know what they are doing just talking to each other. That is hardly
going to help much, all that would do is propagate the "this 'works' for
me" code that is already at the root of a significant proportion of the
problems posted here. And what happens if a loony like VK gets in among
them and posts something like:-
<quote
cite="
<script type="text/javascript">
void function dummy(args) {
alert('Booh!');
}
window.onload = dummy;
....
Function dummy is being parsed and allocated on script load,
but void operator prevents the script context to get a reference
on the allocated memory heap. So it becomes garbage collector
ready right away.
</quote>
- and there is nobody around who understands javascript well enough to
point out that it is total fantasy? Might it not be believed,
propagated, be integrated into a consistent but otherwise fantastic
conception of the language (added to with more contributions from the
same source)? Isn't the result going to be that everyone involved ends
up knowing less of javascript as time goes by (because knowing that you
don't know something is knowing more than believing that you know
something that is false)?
I have not felt similar irritation, annoyment, unfriendliness
e.g. in comp.lang.php, which might have higher volume of traffic
compared to this.comp. lang.javascript
Where "I have not felt ..." is significant; these are your perceptions,
not necessarily the reality.
Of course many people here are polite, friendly, symphatetic.
And you would have people needlessly waste their time regardless.
But even a few exceptions creates an uncomfortable atmosphere.
People cannot easily be prevented form posting to Usenet. But your
perception of the behaviour of one or two individuals does not alter the
benefit that posters will derive from reading the FAQ, they are
unrelated issues.
Richard.
