scs@adam.mit.edu (Steve Summit) (06/03/91)
In article <4524@inews.intel.com> bhoughto@hopi.intel.com (Blair P. Houghton) writes: >>In article <16307@smoke.brl.mil> gwyn@smoke.brl.mil (Doug Gwyn) writes: >[...unfortunate but not unexpected admission that he is leaving...] > >Doug's being his usual, overreactive self. He just can't >bear to send a little email pointing to the FAQ or even >a copy of it... Why is leaving a newsgroup because one doesn't find it valuable an "overreaction"? The problem is not that it takes X amount of time to send out replies to simple questions; the problem is that there is such an escalation of mindless or uninformed babble that there's nothing left to interest the more experienced contributors. I haven't been participating much, myself, lately, because there's hardly anything interesting going on. I've probably been following comp.lang.c for less than half the time Doug has, and I'm getting fed up -- I don't know how he's been able to put up with it for so long. Sure, it only takes a few minutes per day to scan the Subject: lines, but when there's nothing new being discussed, or even any interesting questions to answer, why bother? To me, a good indicator of the vitality and interest level of a group is the percentage of Subject: lines *without* "Re:" on them. That percentage has been very, very low for comp.lang.c lately. This article won't reach the people it needs to reach most -- and that's the problem; no article can. The primary problem is people who learned about news yesterday and are posting today, and there's not much that can be done to reach them before they start posting. However, the secondary -- and, in some ways, bigger -- problem is all the followups from all the people who have been reading for at least a few months and who ought to know better. [Segue into previously-written but never posted comp.unix.wizards meta-article...] The innocent questions are not going to go away. If there were *daily* welcome messages and guidelines documents and FAQ lists, silly questions would still get through. If anything, these questions are going to get more frequent as net readership continues to grow. So we have to work on the repercussions, and that ought to be a more manageable problem, because the people posting followups are at least a little bit more likely to have been reading for a few weeks, and to have seen some of the guidelines or FAQ postings. Remember: before you post, THINK. If a question is so trivial that thousands of people surely know the answer, mail your answer rather than posting -- otherwise you'll be one of the thousands who do post redundant answers. If you're posting a question *or* an answer to a question *or* a comment on or "correction" of some other article, make sure that you know what the relevant FAQ list covers and that your question/ answer/comment isn't on it. It's as important -- if not *more* important -- not to post frequently-posted answers. (It's obviously especially important not to post wrong answers, so if you're not sure, don't post. Why begin an article with "I'm not sure, but it seems to me that..." or "I haven't tested this code, but it should work..."? If you're not sure, wait until a question comes along that you can answer.) Once a question is on an FAQ list, you simply don't have to answer it if it comes up. Don't worry about the person asking it: even if no one mails an answer, within a few weeks the FAQ list will come by again. I don't think we need to guarantee a speedy answer to people who unwittingly ask questions that the FAQ list they didn't read does answer. Besides which, there is a sophisticated, distributed, intelligent mailserver now operating netwide. This server is able to translate questions such as "Where can I find a Fortran-to-C translater" and misstatements such as "all pointers are the same size", no matter how they are worded, and no matter how clouded the meaning, into the equivalent "Please send me a copy of the FAQ list." Steve Summit scs@adam.mit.edu P.S. The second and third paragraphs of this article are going to inspire some nitwit to complain that "comp.lang.c isn't guaranteed to be interesting to you; get off your high horse and quit whining; these `interminable' discussions you're complaining about are perfectly interesting to the rest of us." Save it. Of course comp.lang.c isn't guaranteed to be interesting to me, and if and when it becomes too uninteresting to bear, I'll leave, with no complaint.