Weblog entry #163 for Steve
See all weblog entries made by Steve.
I'm coming to the conclusion that there are some people not worth helping.
Take yesterday for example. I received a reasonably polite mail asking me how to do something.
I spent maybe 15 minutes writing a reply, with examples, and pointers to more information.
Today? I received a mail back with one line of text "It didn't work".
Almost as bad are when you spend 30+ minutes writing a reply then it bounces.
Or worse still when you go out of your way to lookup stuff, write a reasonably good reply and never hear anything back.
I'm not demanding payment, I'm not really looking for "wow your(sic) so l33t i luv u". But a simple "thanks, that worked" would make me happier.
I guess I'm just too used to people complaining and not enough saying thank you.
In the future when somebody asks me a question and doesn't reply in any way I'm just going to killfile them after a week. At least then I won't waste my time helping people who aren't worth the effort more than once.
I see the same thing happening here, the same users constantly asking questions with no apparent appreciation for the effort involved, and a complete unwillingness to use a search engine. Thankfully I can just ignore them here and rely upon the less cynical and more generous users to help.
Update - see also my previous entry on this topic.
In other news I've disabled the bayasian filtering of anonymous comments.
Comments on this Entry
I just wanted to say that I hope a few unkind people don't make you cynical. You were very friendly when I needed help with gnump3d. :)
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Thanks!
I usually don't mind just a recent run of three or four in a day or two which managed to make me annoyed.
I should rant less - I usually regret it afterward.
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My advice is free and comes without warranty. At work my advice is paid for and comes with a warranty. In both cases people happily chose to ignore it and cock-up. Once upon a time I use to care, now I don't. Here is my advice, take it or leave it.
As Agatha Christie once said: "Good advice is always certain to be ignored, but that's no reason not to give it."
If you get bitter, cynical and give up then the time wasters and morons have won. This sites access statistics should prove how popular good advice is.
--
"It's Not Magic, It's Work"
Adam
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On the one hand I care more here - because more people are affected by greedyness, but since requests aren't directed at me personally it is much less bothersome to me.
With email "support", or questions, it very much more personal so when it goes bad I feel more frustration.
Having said that though I have learned to tune out comments from some users, just because they seem to not appreciate it. I did like the idea of /.'s friends/foes lists for making that kind of relationship explicit, but ultimately I decided the effort of implementing it wasn't worth the tiny gain. (As time goes on I'm less keen on adding significant new features. The core site works well and more features/facilities would probably not be useful enough to justify their implementation effort.)
I think, on the whole, this site has a mostly decent bunch of users (anonymous or not) and so it isn't so much of an issue.
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sno
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I think so too! So I avoid IRC almost entirely.
I'm sometimes logged into freenode for a few weeks at a time, but mostly I'm "away" in a screen session ...
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WOOHOO! Thanks :)
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No worries.
If there are more problems I'll turn it back on, but I'll tune it more carefully and also make sure that a single failure doesn't result in persistent refusals to post comments.
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