Certainly, as a CCI, if I haven't gotten an answer here in 24 hours, I'm on the phone and whining to my brother-in-law who is friends with a Linux geek who may or may not call me back, depending on how many favors he owes my brother-in-law. If that fails, I simply give up. Do I really NEED to listen to the radio with RealPlayer? No. And it usually happens that a few weeks later, I inadvertently discover an alternative fix, or work-around, or even a solution to the original problem.

So I would say to you experts: look at the quality of the question. If it's written by One Of You and is over a week old, my guess is it has been solved, because you're all brilliant. If it's written by One Of Us (CCIs), it's probably irrelevant now. If it falls somewhere in between, I'd say the person has probably delt with it somehow, someway, someplace by 2 weeks.

May I also say that I have more than once begun to post a question, but by the time I had written the entire question out with all the things I'd tried, I realize that I haven't yet tried X, so I do that, and presto, the problem is solved and I erase my question.

Frustration and impatience makes it hard to write a very detailed question, though.

Nina, who never was and never will by One Of You.

Horse-shit.
See my post earlier in this thread - we all learn and grow.

What's a CCI? I hate all these abbreviations. I'm not sure I get where all this one of you, one of us stuff comes from. What is this in reference to?

CCI= certified computer idiot. see a post a littleways back.

titanium_geek

Oh, dear, didn't mean to be offensive. I'm just a little old lady who dislikes The Evil Empire. All of you seem to actually LIKE messing about with computer guts. I only do it if I absolutely have to. But perhaps I have attributed super-powers and a taste for programming to you that you don't have. Abject apologies.

Nina, bowing low and backing hastily out of the room

Relax, Nina. You're doing just fine.

Who's "[a]ll of you"? I'm not a programmer, and I don't like "messing about with computer guts." You seem to be imposing a false dichotomy on a complex sociological phenomenon. We aren't just either total newbies or advanced programmers--anyone in between is part of the LinuxQuestions community (including me).

Using Linux means your a little smarter than most when it comes to computers, lest I hope. And your not afraid to dig for the answers, asking for help don't really help. Sure you mite get the answer but you'll learn more by getting the answer for yourself. Getting to the end of the yellow brick road by yourself has it's own reward.

There are some who only ask questions but a lot answer them too.

The worst however is when you either get a totally wrong answer like on a Linux to Linux only Network (i.e no Windows) when someone starts talking about SAMBA or in other cases when you have a genuine problem say with getting remote printing to work from a Linux client to a Linux remote machine --and you get a totally unhelpful answer like --Use CUPS or Logon to localhost:931 -- the GUI is still TOTALLY CONFUSING to those who wouldn't know or care what IPX is or IPP or whatever.

Phrasing questions correctly is difficult --and answering them SIMPLY,Clearly and concisely is also extremely difficult but I would suggest people do give some real indications as to what the problem is.

A post like "My Wireless Connection Doesn't work" is really no good at all even if you want to help you can't do it as there are too many unknowns in the question.

I'd love to suggest the following

1) Allow INLINE screenshots. a lot of people have access to either their own website or most ISP's allow you a decent anmount of disk space --you can limit the size to say 800 X 600 pixels.

2) have a subsection in the Distribution forums where people can submit their Config files --these are often very helpful in resolving problems.

3) perhaps a section on tips / tricks should be added for each distribution.

For example there is almost NOWHERE you can find out except by accident how to format a brand new partition with REISERFS -- hands up how many have used the mkreiserfs command --similarly a great partitioning tool nobody ever mentions (found out also by accident) is CFDISK (NOTE NOT FDISK) included in SUSE and maybe other distributions.

Otherwise I think it's a great board with mostly helpful people.

Cheers

-K

To answer only one of your points: the tips and tricks section is also known as the Linux Tutorials section. Feel free to post as many how tos there as you think would be useful.

Also, the config file section may be best suited to our LQ Wiki. You could put up there the config file, the machine specs, the distro and then if anyone else finds it useful, they can add their own distro (example, you post that it works with SUSE 9.3, someone says that it helps them with SUSE 10 and so on.). The good part is that if a later distro version needs a minor change, the article would say "use the above config file, but change <this line> for <this new info>" and so it could keep growing while keeping an original version to help people as a start point.

Std deviation is HUGE from the median.

I only recently started running LINUX and I have to say that statistics aside I have found these forums valuable beyond anything I have encountered before in computer problem solving. If it were not for the help of people here I certainly couldn't be running slack as happily as I am, if at all. It has been on my mind that I would like to put something back for all that I've been given here in help not only to run my system but to learn. My main reason for running LINUX. Unfortunately I haven't seen any questions I could answer yet, but I certainly look forward to the time when I can participate that fully.

Regards

Draiocht

Most people here are asking questions that I have absolutley no idea of what might be wrong, im still a linux noob.

Sometimes things will come up that I will know an answer to, but Im not a hardcore linux junkie /guru.