[ale] RTFM

Greg runman at telocity.com
Mon Nov 12 23:09:32 EST 2001


I generally stop the RTFM-ed-ness when I ask a question by first telling
everyone *everything* that I have done and what I have done that the manual
says also so that several remedies can be immediately ruled out and any
person reading can get a real good overall idea of the situation -
especially when stuff can get complicated very fast. This is essential on
several other newsgroups (OpenBSD comes to mind instantly) as it is the
expected behaviour... I think that there is a How-To on asking questions
even .. I think that Richard Stallman wrote it maybe ?  I just trashed my
bookmarks but I have it at work it anyone wants it.

The footer is a good idea.

My $0.02

Greg

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Arafat Mohamed [mailto:abmtek at yahoo.com]
> Sent: Monday, November 12, 2001 12:36 PM
> To: Matt Shade
> Cc: ale at ale.org
> Subject: Re: [ale] RTFM
>
>
> I didn't think you meant it that way :)
>
> The reason I added the second half of my post is because I have seen the
> RTFM reaction before and it bothers me. So I took this opportunity to
> remind everyone the reason that drew me to Linux and the open source
> commmunity in the first place. We help each other out because we are a
> community. And like my teacher used to say, "there are no stupid
> question, only stupid answers" ;-)
>
> I do like the idea of adding a footer with a faq and a link to "specific
> posts" that could be usefull. The problem with search engines is getting
> the right keywords and sifting through the numerous unrelated links that
> you invariably get.
>
> Like I said, the biggest problem I had was not having gotten the smbfs
> package. Nowhere in my searches did I find a specific link to this. If
> anything all I got was "make sure you have samba". In this case the
> samba package wasn't enough. It was only after going back and forth with
> Michael that we were able to nail the problem.
>
> On Mon, 2001-11-12 at 12:15, Matt Shade wrote:
> > I'm sorry if I sounded like "Stop asking stupid
> questions".....honestly, I
> > didn't mean it that way. I was just reminded of something I'd
> wanted to say
> > for a while. There are lots of times when I remember seeing something
> > "sometime recently" and wished I could find it easily. I didn't want to
> > single out anyone's specific post (sorry it was yours). I just
> took  that
> > moment to toss out my idea of adding a footer with a faq and link to the
> > searchable archives.
> >
> > I'm sure I've asked questions that have made people think of telling me
> > RTFM!
> >
> >
> > matt shade
> > www.threekay.com
>
>
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