A little patience, PLEASE

[Kai Schaetzl]

Stephe Campbell wrote on         Wed, 14 Apr 2004 14:09:03 -0400:

> Obviously, the archives should be the first source of questioning if you
> know what to search for, but to _reply_ to someone who is new, confused or
> just 'without coffee' suggesting that they should look in the archives for
> something is somewhat of a joke.
>

I'm somewhat baffled. I'm not reading much of this list nor answering many
messages on this list and the reason is that the off-topic noise has
increased so heavily that I sometimes just skip the whole incoming stream of
mails for days. I considered unsubscribing and keeping only the
announce-list lately. But *when* I read I see that many people still answer
all these off-topic questions quite patiently, with much more patience than
I would be able to show. And only in the most "obvious" cases I see someone
refer to other locations. When a list search is recommended it is either for
very obvious easy answers or for ones where we indeed have a particular
message or thread and no other information. I'd deem it a bit unfriendly to
ask repliers to go thru the same search process and dig up the information
for someone else who is too lazy or naive to do this himself. You seem to
think that repliers have a whole article saved on their disk just waiting
for the next question, but refrain from using it. Surprise, that's not the
case.
So, what I want to say in short is that this list is very friendly and
open-minded compared to other lists, despite the high rate (50%?) of
off-topic questions and questions which could have been answered easily by
the posters themselves after a little bit of thinking or research.


Kai

--

Kai Schätzl, Berlin, Germany
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