They don't help me -- I've never used them. I always enter tags when I start a thread, hoping they may be some use to someone ...

Could get big indeed, but I for one like the whole topic. Keep it up, I'm learning something new every day. And don't worry about the spelling error(s), someone here will surely point them out

Would like to see something in the 'howto' that stresses the importance of patience towards both newcomers and hardheaded people. I've had the occasion to help out some people here and although I'm not a guru at all, the posters I reply to seem pretty thankful because I'm putting in the time. In my opinion it's very important that someone who puts in time to answer or to guide a poster, takes the time to 'take himself down to the level of understanding of the original poster'. Most of them are newcomers to Linux and if we start throwing funny commands and things they don't understand at them they will get scared off. Lot's of them will just blindly follow your lead without learning anything, so a replier should at least take the time to explain what a command does and why you're telling him to do that.

Kind regards,

Eric

Hi,

Could you elaborate a bit on the 'tags' please? I don't know where to add them but it might come in handy.

Kind regards,

Eric

I have never used or paid attention to tags.

Yes that would be nice - but not actually something that the person answering can really do.

It is mostly useful for those seeking answers themselves - if it is marked [solved] then that is the thread to look in first. It is also good for OPs to post feedback. You'd put this request as part of your stock request for feedback.

"@OP: How did you get on? If you have solved the problem, please tell us what worked and mark the thread solved. That would be a big help - thanks."

Ah, bit it is a context-sensitive menu so I won't have seen it thank go to damgar for pointing this out.

All right that's it!

I'm loading this into a text editor and running the spell-checker on it. Guess what, it caught about 30 errors so you can stop being smug (FYI: Repy is a place in Czech Republic, so the sentence refers to threads which do not have anything to do with it.) <sniff>

You know, its actually getting quite hard to hunt through that post for errors.

Sure!

At the bottom of each post is a little "tags" button. Just click the button and a one-line text box will appear where you can type in keywords. So if someone has a question about setting up Apache on their Fedora 12 system, I might hit the tag button and type in "fedora apache". As I'm typing "fedora" there will be autocomplete options, like "fedora+10", "fedora+11" and so on, so I can select "fedora+12" from the list.

So far the main potential benefit I can see is that it is possible to search posts by tags, so someone who is a Fedora guru or Apache guru could check for posts with those tags.

At the bottom of each post is a "tags" button and a link explaining what it means.

If we get a tag policy it may be quite useful - finding similar posts etc - but it may be too late for that what with millions of posts and all.

Yeah - I remember learning a lot about posting from other very aged members like XavierP myself. When someone who has written more than 9000 of these things writes an answer - pay attention not just to what they say, but how they do it.There is a bit about reading the questions tutorial - and that one stresses patience. I also did a bit on attitude in the assumption of intellegence section. Anyone else thing more patience stress required?

"Gods give me patience - and hurry up about it!" It can be tricky to gauge the level to pitch the reply to. At east we don't see so much of:

open a terminal and type "command" but without the quotation marks, then press enter.

Most people seem to figure out:

enter command

But I have known someone to type (I kid you not)

command without quotes then press enter

Then there is this. [gif]

Which is where patience comes it...

It occurs to me that if someone makes a post which helps you get the answer for OP, it is polite to hit the thanks button. While you are at it, also search posts by author "Simon Bridge" and hit the thanks button on all the ones you find... saves me creating a dummy user and doing this myself. Appreciated

Good grief: have I really been doing this for 7 years?!
Maybe I should get a life(TM)

"Life"? Don't talk to me about "life"!

You just want the thanks or you consider it worth while to know who thanked you (i.e. clicked the thanks button) ?

As there is no way to find out who clicked the button, so may be that's the reason many people do not bother to click it

I think he's a lot older than he claims to be. XavierP's first post was a reply to this question from cbabbage:

I've been here for quite some time and posting quite a lot but never even paid attention to that. Thanks for pointing it out an explaning the use.

Kind regards,

Eric

Maybe a warning!

My hat is of to ericTRA for the patience I've seen him exhibit in a thread I felt had been answered sufficiently repeatedlyj by multiple people for taking a newbie on for another 3 days after myself and others had given up until the newbie finally got a resoltution. Patience of Job as my Mom would say.

The point I'm making is just like the homework policy, too much help can be counterproductive to the development of the new user. It might be worth a mention that some people will require/seek ENORMOUS PATIENCE.

What none of you realise is that I am in fact one of the SQL servers which achieved sentience.

Tags are useful for double-categorising. To explain: let's say you write a post but don't know whether it's mostly Hardware or mostly Software. Now, you could double post and risk your posting rep, or you could put it in Software and tag it as "hardware". This would let everyone know that there appears to be a couple of things it could be and it becomes searchable by tag.

You can do the same with a post. If you tag a post with "solution", for example, this would let others know which one worked for you. These posts also become more easily searchable.

Whatever you do, DON'T use the tagspace to either put your title in or to put in random gibberish. To use this thread title as an example, you would end up with "A, Answering, Linux, Question" as the tags. Only one of those words is usefully searchable as "A" or "Linux" or "Question" are all words generally used here. Arguably "Answering" is also a crap word to try to search on.

I go through different opinions on bad titles: they are clearly a bad thing, as a proliferation of bad titles makes it more difficult for people to search through already existing answers and finding answers to their questions there.

Sometimes I feel that just ignoring the 'bad title' posts is the thing to do, sometimes I try to answer, pointing out that the title is a bad one (and note that hardly ever does it happen that the OP will revise the title from 'Urgent; please help' to 'Problem setting up Apache on a laptop with limited memory', even when the bad title aspect has been pointed out.)

One important, and common, category of posts that you do not directly discuss are the incomprehensible/semi-comprehensible ones. There are many posts like:
'poble wit pache rgnet, plzzz lp'

At some point, you have to say, 'Please write in English' for more marginal cases, it seems reasonable to ask whether that was 'Apache' or 'a patch' that had caused the problem.


I think the rule of thumb for 'Homework-style' questions is to try to provoke the OP to discover the answer themselves, rather than giving them an answer that they do not have to think about, before submitting it for marking.

The OP is doing some kind of course, and that course should be 'do-able' without external expert advice, but the teaching methods that work for one person don't always work for others. So, it is legitimate to provoke the OP into thinking about the problem in a different way (which may or may not be the way that takes the OP forward), but spoon-feeding them with an answer doesn't help in the longer term.


and
I think the point the point about tags is that they should help someone trying to find existing posts on a closely related subject. So, they don't really help anyone 'in' the current thread, but they do/should help in avoiding hundreds of repeat posts of essentially the same subject. (...and why do these go in waves...the '32/64 bit software' and/or the 'I don't see all of my memory' has been a recent one, but 'What distro should I select for a low resource computer' is more of a long-term favourite.)

(Their use for, eg, Apache gurus has been mentioned, but I don't see that as the main advantage, but a subsidiary benefit: YMMV.)

However, searching for existing threads doesn't really happen as much as it should today, so maybe we should be discussing how this could be made to work better. I think it might help if there was a list of easily-selected, pre-chosen, tags that you could choose from, as a default, with a bit more pain to come up with your own, brand new, tag.

Maybe, if, before you could start a thread (at least for your first few thread starts), you were asked about what your tags were going to be and then asked whether you wanted to see the list of posts that had those tags, that would be a prompt.

If I thought that the next million posts could all be made to comply with some policy, I'd probably be prepared to take this on as a mission, but I suspect that all we can do is improve things a little bit.

UTCs... So, you are saying a post with the title 'Urgent' or 'Help me!!!!!!!!' should just be reported? OK.

Yes, you are right that this would be an economy, but shouldn't we also consider whether a tutorial or article might not be more appropriate?


...the OP is never a realist, but do not often realise???

...as long as it was only theirs...

I always wondered about that...meaning of life discovered...

You know and I know that they didn't. But we'll play let's pretend, shall we? By the way, why does no one use 'apropos' or 'man -k', which seems to be a synonym?

Maybe you want to re-think the acronym; were someone to conclude that this starts 'google it yourself', the final outcome might not be what you want, if they don't think that the F is likely to stand for 'Friend'.

@EricTRA...ahh, the patience thing...

I'm not sure about Eric's point about 'hardheaded people'. I think that exactly what he means here may not have been very clear (at least to me).

On the other hand, there are many posts by people for whom English clearly isn't their first language; I'm always impressed that these are not the worst to read (that, surprisingly sought-after, award seems to go to the people who have ignored the ban on text-ese, and who just run everything together without any sign of paragraphs, punctuation or ability to use the shift key...I always say to myself they will really struggle if they ever have to work with computers ). Clearly, consideration is needed for those who struggle with English, but, IMHO, shouldn't extend to those who have decided that it is easier not to struggle with English.