<snip - only because it was rather long > if more people would read the manual or know how to find commonly asked and solved quetions this list would probaly drop in 20% (very rough estimate) of posts. Getting that information to the people who arn't reading the manual is a difficult task, cause if they arn't reading the manual, why would they even bother with reading the information on how to find the answer.
Now noisyness from the 'helpers'... I have noticed at times that a question is answered the same way like 10 times by 10 different people; this I consider more noisy than a RTFM post.
Agreed again.
be. Is it too difficult to not answer the post at all if you disagree with the content?
Now, I kinda wondered at first if I should not respond to this cause it's rather in a disagreement tone :)
Nevermind the tone, you have a point. My post was about people who chronically answer with an attitude (half of their posts have to do with the manual). As far as I can tell you always take the time to help, I'm surprised you picked on this.
People are sometimes lazy or simply they just don't know what to look for, to look up a function you must know the name of it, what's the big deal to reply with a function name as opposed to RTFM, you do it anyway. I'll tell you what the difference is, you are bored to death for hearing the same question for the millionth time and feel vindictive. You're shooting the messenger though. If you are at the point where you can't deal with newbies it's understandable (been there, done that), but it's not their fault.
I understand the RTFM attitude, because in many cases the tone of the question shows that the manual HAS NOT been read. Or that some basic thought was put into what is being attempted. I also think a lot of people are coming to PHP without programming or database experience. They have either heard that PHP is "cool", or have gotten dumped into it by starting to use a packaged applcation, like Community Calendar. Consider how many requests have we had on the list for a "Visual Editor" for PHP.
If you are going to use MySQL, it is reasonable to expect that the person does some command line work with MySQL, finds out how common commands work, becomes familiar with MySQL's searchable on-line manual, etc.
It logically follows that the next step is to become familiar with the MySQL portion of the PHP manual, and by extension how arrays work in PHP.
There are also debugging procedures to follow: display the error message, echo the problem statement, simplify, divide and conquer, etc.
THEN come to this list, and you know what the question is and how to ask it. (And can be corrected, as I was once with a basic syntax error when a while loop wasn't working - something about a misplaced ";")
Problems then become a lot easier to solve - and let's face it, most of them are pretty simple; we've tended to create a too-complex environment.
I'll shut up now.
Miles
PS Maybe we should refer everyone to Steve Litt's www.troubleshooters.com for a read through on his troubleshooting process. /mt
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