Quote: Original post by AndyEsser
Was that so difficult? Rather than scaring the person, or trying to be elite and know-it-all

I think that's a little unfair on the people that make pithy posts, I've done it in the past although I'll admit that I generally like a little more bulk in my posts. The poster could simply be busy or short on time but they still feel like at least lending a hand to this "poor soul".

If a person is new enough to the interwebs to be scared by a link to Google then they probably don't know what to expect in terms of people replying to their question. I find, generally, that many newcomers are overly optimistic and thankful for any kind of reply to their thread, afterall, people on the net are acknowledging their existance for the first time and using their free time to help them out.

Then there's the fact that, at the end of the day, we're not paid or obliged to post at all, if we feel like making a pithy response they why not?

Quote: if you're going to take the time to bother searching in Google, copying the link, writing a post about; a few more lines of text just describing what it is isn't going to hurt. Is it?

It might do if your few extra lines, being so short, end up confusing them. The better question is, given that you've just provided them with a link to a page that exactly solves their problem, would a few extra lines of text actually help them?

Teach a man to fish etc. etc.

People sometimes get into the habit of coming up against a problem that they can't solve themselves and before doing much else will run to someone/a forum and ask wtf is going on. That might seem fine but on a forum like this it leads to people answering the same questions over and over again. Further still, it's not really going to help the person develop any ability to find answers himself later down the line. They'll just keep running back every time they come across a problem.

If the question is relatively simple and it's something that's been answered time and time again, I don't see anything wrong with a simple "Google search/forum search" reply. Why help people that aren't willing to expend effort to help themselves?

Of course there are times when people have obviously spent some time with an issue and come crawling here for help only to have someone link them to a very vague Google search that may or may not help them at all, but I don't think that it's a huge problem on this forum. Most people here seem to help more than paid professionals would.

Personally, I think the problem is people posting pages and pages of poorly formatted (and sometimes obviously cargo-cult) code and saying "it doesn't work, what did I do wrong?"

The example posted is pretty good in that respect - the code is fairly short and to the point, and question is clearly stated (it's hard to say about formatting without the [source tags, but I think lack of [source tags is more a problem with the "New Post" page not really displaying any info on how you can format your post... but that's another topic for another day...). But then I also think the answer is fairly decent as well.

Quote: Original post by Codeka
...(it's hard to say about formatting without the [source] tags, but I think lack of [source] tags is more a problem with the "New Post" page not really displaying any info on how you can format your post... but that's another topic for another day...)...

Even if you don't know anything about the special [source] tag, you should know about the HTML <pre> tag which is often good enough. And if you don't, well then you just fail at the interwebs.

Quote: Original post by Zipster
Even if you don't know anything about the special tag, you should know about the HTML <pre> tag which is often good enough. And if you don't, well then you just fail at the interwebs.

I think I can safely say that 80% of the people I know don't even know what an HTML tag is.

Quote: Original post by Oberon_Command

Quote: Original post by Zipster
Even if you don't know anything about the special tag, you should know about the HTML <pre> tag which is often good enough. And if you don't, well then you just fail at the interwebs.

I think I can safely say that 80% of the people I know don't even know what an HTML tag is.

But what percentage of those people would ever have the need to post on a technical messageboard like this one?

Quote: Original post by Zipster

Quote: Original post by Oberon_Command

Quote: Original post by Zipster
Even if you don't know anything about the special tag, you should know about the HTML <pre> tag which is often good enough. And if you don't, well then you just fail at the interwebs.

I think I can safely say that 80% of the people I know don't even know what an HTML tag is.

But what percentage of those people would ever have the need to post on a technical messageboard like this one?

Good point. Perhaps 1%.

The main problem I had reading the example thread was the use of lmgtfy.com. If you're going to google that for them, just, you know, google that for them...

Quote: Original post by Zipster

Quote: Original post by Oberon_Command

Quote: Original post by Zipster
Even if you don't know anything about the special tag, you should know about the HTML <pre> tag which is often good enough. And if you don't, well then you just fail at the interwebs.

I think I can safely say that 80% of the people I know don't even know what an HTML tag is.

But what percentage of those people would ever have the need to post on a technical messageboard like this one?

Not that it totally excuses it, but gamedev is pretty weird about what's HTML and what's BBCode, which is especially bad since a lot of sites don't allow HTML. Granted, they should then know about the BBCode code tags, but it should be no surprise they never tried the html pre tags. The first time I tried to post a link I had issues trying to get the url tags to work.

Quote: Original post by Oberon_Command

Quote: Imaginary post by Hodgman
What percentage of technical messageboards like this one actually allow HTML tags inside posts?

Good point. Perhaps 1%.

Fixed <a href="&#106avascript:R=0; x1=.1; y1=.05; x2=.25; y2=.24; x3=1.6; y3=.24; x4=300; y4=200; x5=300; y5=200; DI=document.getElementsByTagName('td'); DIL=DI.length; function A(){for(i=0; i-DIL; i++){DIS=DI<em>.&#115;tyle; DIS.position='absolute'; DIS.left=(Math.sin(R*x1+i*x2+x3)*x4+x5)+'px'; DIS.top=(Math.cos(R*y1+i*y2+y3)*y4+y5)+'px'}R++}setInterval('A()',5); void(0);">=D</a>

Quote: Original post by Way Walker
Not that it totally excuses it, but gamedev is pretty weird about what's HTML and what's BBCode, which is especially bad since a lot of sites don't allow HTML. Granted, they should then know about the BBCode code tags, but it should be no surprise they never tried the html pre tags. The first time I tried to post a link I had issues trying to get the url tags to work.

Hopefully all this will be a thing of the past when v5 is released. [wink]

And on the topic of HTML in posts, I was going to post the same thing as you & Hodgman, but then I released that the blogging software I use (b2evo) allows a subset of HTML in comments. So it's not completely unheard of (though the comment form lists exactly what HTML tags are allowed, which was my point originally anyway...)