Before I start, I would like to say that ... Yes I do know this is in the wrong forum, but there is a good reason for that. This area of the forum seems to get particularly abused when it comes to off topic questions. While I could feel this way primarily due to the fact that I spend much more time in this forum then any out other forum on this website, I really wanted to ask the 'regulars' of the Programmer Forum what should be done outside moving the clueless questions we've been getting.

Spending some time over at Coding Horror catching up with the week that I've missed so far, I found an article about the problem we seem to be having in this very area of this very forum. That problem is LazyWeb or "Asking a question of an internet audience in the hopes that they will be able to find a solution that you were too lazy or inexperienced to find yourself."



What do you think can be done, should be done to educate the masses? Show them the error of their ways and tell them that the programmer forum is not there own personal QA area? We have alot of smart people in these parts, please speak up.

My proposal, make How To Ask Questions The Smart Way. required reading.

Irony, I actually saw that same site with those pictures, today in my Computer Animation class.

Quote from Dygear :

My proposal, make How To Ask Questions The Smart Way. required reading.

That's a crap proposal, quite frankly. How exactly do you propose that this be enforced? Simply it can't, therefore it cannot ever be deemed as required reading as we have no measure that they've ever read it.

Yes people ask daft questions, yes they end up in the wrong subforum. Learn to live with it.

Yes it's annoying, but we now have a separate subforum for requests which, in Bob's words, will ensure that most of the drivel stays out of the eyes of the usuals and make it easier to find previous posts.

To be frank, its just subconciously encouraging to those who believe they should post X, Y or Z here, should they see this thread. Further more, why are you allowed to break the common courtesy that you seem to want to uphold so badly? It seems like a pure case of hypocrisy, with no good reason whatsoever.

Like anybody's going to read a 20-page RFC before posting "Can u liek make me sum insims 4 teh cruise server?"

... You all missed the point, it's mainly my own fault, so we might as well just delete this thread.

So something useful would come out of this thread, It would be nice if we could delete our own threads.

Quote from Dygear :

So something useful would come out of this thread, It would be nice if we could delete our own threads.

Having seen the state of some of the owner subforums (for league sections) where there is a raft of deleted threads (they are still visible to mods), I'd have second thoughts about letting such a feature 'go mainstream'.

tbh I think it's quite arrogant to say that. There are a LOT of completely "valid" questions here and the fact that most of them seem to cover very basic stuff does not necessarily mean that the inquirers are lazy.
There is only so much time in a life and you can either go and try to do everything by yourself or use the web for collaboration.

Lots of members appreciate the help they receive from you "insim gods". I know I did.
Chances are that if you happen to read this forum, you're ready to "volunteer" to do some LFS work and make the game more fun, whether you are a "newbie" and ask to learn about it or you're an insim god who is fluent in multiple programming languages and voluntarily answer these questions.

About the few "Can u liek make me sum insims 4 teh cruise server?" questions... just delete the dupes.

There's a huge, huge difference between lazy and inexperienced, although one can be both at the same time. If a question bothers you, don't answer it. Ignore the poster, w/e. I cba (touché) read that link that most probably could be summed up as 'use your common sense'.

Maybe in a professional environment it can work where everyone's interested but it doesn't work on public game forums, and that's why forum mods exist. They can send a guiding PM to the offender (from a template ofc, who writes those from scratch every time..). I was a mod on a free-to-register software forum where clueless people flamed when they didn't understand and never heard of search. If the mod section hadn't had templates for every offence imaginable I'd probably be living in a mental institution right now.

Tbh, the similar topics feature that was introduced recently (?) is great. I don't think there's point in huge RFCs on netiquette.

disclaimer: like i said, i didn't read that rfc so i might be talking outta my arse. no change there though