On Tue, Jul 17, 2001 at 03:28:35PM -0400, Neal and Kristen came up with this idea: > I can understand people asking questions because of a lack of > skill/training/understanding. Its the ones where they are just flat > too damned lazy to even attempt to find a solution for themselves > that irritate me. For a perfect example, a couple of weeks ago, > someone was asking for a version of the prompt patch for bpl18 because > the one on the ftp site was for somewhere around patch13. Did this > guy even bother opening up the patch, compare what it does to what > his code looks like and attempt to make the changes (after making a > backup of comm.c of course ;) before he comes whining to the list > wanting someone to do it for him? Of course not. These are the > people that should be roasted on a spit over a roaring fire. I have > no problem with questions, as long as you make SOME effort towards > figuring it out yourself before you come and ask it. And that has > nothing to do with skill, or lack there of, but just pure laziness. <rant> What really gets me are the people who post asking some RFOAQ (Ridiculously Frequently Overasked Question), finally get someone to either give them the code, the absolute url of the snippet, the line number of the FAQ, or something along those lines, then two days later ask another question that could be found, say, ten lines in the FAQ from their previous question. </rant> <rave> Sometimes I'll be nice, especially if they were at least considerate enough to add a [NEWBIE] to the subject. Gives me the chance to ignore it if I don't have time for it. Sometimes I'll even give them some code, like someone asking about lvl restricted eq a little while ago. I was bored and it was about 5 lines of code. It seemed kinda ridiculously obvious to anyone who knew the code, there's only a few places that'd need to be even looked at. But not everyone has almost every line of code memorized. As for experience etc, occasionally everyone needs some help even if it's just some outside input. Like I just got done with a problem of my mud refusing to dump a core when it crashed. After about 6 hours, a friend of mine walked past, stuck his finger on the screen and said "Why do you have THAT line in there?" - viola. </rave> Ok, got that out of the way. Here's an idea.. What about a Faq-o-matic type setup for the website? Since reading through the FAQ seems to be WAY too much work for some people, that might take a little of the load off the mailservers. > > Do these mega bundles contribute to laziness? Yes, or at least > a little bit. If you download a copy of circle30bpl18.tgz, you > expect it to work as soon as you compile it. A lot of people have > that same expectation of these bundles and that isn't always the > case. I don't really think so. I consider lots of the stuff in the bundles to be all but mandatory in muds. Writing an editor to integrate into the mud isn't exactly a simple task. Not hard, but still a lot of work to do from scratch. The scripts, well I'm still adding to and debugging DG, but some type of scripting is definitely required. As for why people would expect source created by lots of volunteer work to work on every platform right off the bat, I don't know. But then, what, are they planning to compile that, put it online, and call themselves the next greatest thing since diced turnips? (Almost forgot.. "With heavily modified code.") -mike P.S. I think there was a point in there somewhere. -- +---------------------------------------------------------------+ | FAQ: http://qsilver.queensu.ca/~fletchra/Circle/list-faq.html | | Archives: http://post.queensu.ca/listserv/wwwarch/circle.html | +---------------------------------------------------------------+
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