Why oh Why....
Posted: Fri Jun 13, 2003 10:48 am
[mini, pointless rant on]
What's up with the "I'm just a newbie/ee/33" and "LOL" on so many posts. We don't care if you're new to PHP or not; we'll still help you. We appreciate it when people post a "thank you" post to "close" a thread after the problem has been solved, but why does everyone it seems add a "LOL' to their thank you. I doubt they are actually laughing out loud. What do they think adding that adds to their post, or to our impression of them?
When I see that ('LOL' in a thank you post, not other places typically) I know I get less inclined to help that person again. It tends to make me feel like they are down-playing the thanks and are ridiculing the problem they had. Furthermore, to me, it seems that the 'LOL's imply that use doesn't think it was a "real" problem and probably hasn't learned from it. Often we see almost identical problems being posted by the same people which confirms this view for me. Or I have to wonder if they are laughing at us for helping them.....
I can see two types of problems/questions liking to have laughter inducing effects. One, the extremely easy problem that is embarassing to the poster. I think this is where post of these cases arise. Yes, being able to laugh at yourself over something stupid is a good feature, but you also have to take it seriously enough to learn from it..... In most cases, reading the stickies would have solved the problem. Or learning simple debugging techniques, such as "look for the missing semicolon/missing brace, etc".
The other case is when its one of the weird interactions between lots of different components that "interesting" on a more hackish level. But I think people posting these types of gotchas are much more inclined to use a smiley than a LOL. And in this case it seems like the poster is providing a service back to the community. "Hey look if you use foo with bar you can get some unexpected results due to the interaction with baz. Isn't that interesting?" type of thing.
[end rant]
What's up with the "I'm just a newbie/ee/33" and "LOL" on so many posts. We don't care if you're new to PHP or not; we'll still help you. We appreciate it when people post a "thank you" post to "close" a thread after the problem has been solved, but why does everyone it seems add a "LOL' to their thank you. I doubt they are actually laughing out loud. What do they think adding that adds to their post, or to our impression of them?
When I see that ('LOL' in a thank you post, not other places typically) I know I get less inclined to help that person again. It tends to make me feel like they are down-playing the thanks and are ridiculing the problem they had. Furthermore, to me, it seems that the 'LOL's imply that use doesn't think it was a "real" problem and probably hasn't learned from it. Often we see almost identical problems being posted by the same people which confirms this view for me. Or I have to wonder if they are laughing at us for helping them.....
I can see two types of problems/questions liking to have laughter inducing effects. One, the extremely easy problem that is embarassing to the poster. I think this is where post of these cases arise. Yes, being able to laugh at yourself over something stupid is a good feature, but you also have to take it seriously enough to learn from it..... In most cases, reading the stickies would have solved the problem. Or learning simple debugging techniques, such as "look for the missing semicolon/missing brace, etc".
The other case is when its one of the weird interactions between lots of different components that "interesting" on a more hackish level. But I think people posting these types of gotchas are much more inclined to use a smiley than a LOL. And in this case it seems like the poster is providing a service back to the community. "Hey look if you use foo with bar you can get some unexpected results due to the interaction with baz. Isn't that interesting?" type of thing.
[end rant]