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Old 21st July 2008
dk_netsvil dk_netsvil is offline
Real Name: Devon
Fdisk Soldier
 
Join Date: May 2008
Location: New York
Posts: 75
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I think that the pursuit of perfection is a fundamentally flawed endeavor, but I think it certainly helps if a forum member accepts that this is a community resource and serves a larger entity. If it helps to think about it this way consider that a forum is a binary society: there are people who are asking for help and people who are responding to those requests.

I think the ideal member asking should be clear about what they would like to know, as clear as language allows since many people from non-english speaking countries wind up here, as well as patient. I know I hate seeing a question like, "I want to build an enterprise web server. Someone give me step-by-step instructions." I appreciate that the person asking for this assistance has a desire to get involved, but I think it's symbiotic: if the asker provides some details as to how far they got before they got stuck they tend to get a better response. It helps if the person asking for information is detailed in their post. I don't want your IP address or your domain name, but I want to know if you compile apache 2.2.4 manually and which modules you're trying to use.

Responders should be clear and patient, which I think most of the active posters are. I think responders, philanthropists that they are, are making an offer of advice or a solution to someone's problem. I think a responder needs to do some quick fact-checking prior to making a suggestion. I know there have been a few times that I posted something off-the-cuff and shortly realized my post was going to be completely useless for one reason or another and immediately I edited my post to contain something more relevant.

I'm not perfect, but there is room for improvement, and anything I can do to facilitate change I am willing to do. If someone asks a general question and I give a general response I'm not sure there's a real problem there. If someone makes a specific request for help, say, debugging their IPv6 firewall and pastes in their pf rules and I offer up some general IPv6 trivia I suppose I have what's coming to me.
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