I was just reading back through a thread from a couple of days ago where I bailed someone out of what could have been some really deep doo for that person.

Now, this person had come to the site for help of a specific type, and wound up taking the advice of another person who has only a few posts on this site.

It happens that the advice was bad. No, more than bad, it was terrible and displayed either a very cavalier attitude by the person offering the advice, or just plain ignorance. The result was that the person's problems were compounded.

I just wandered by, saw what was happening, took over, and got the person's situation back under control. This person, who I believe to be young female, was evidently in tears due to fear of massive data loss; I showed her how to undo the damage. Yay for me.

But it points to a problem, and I actually don't know what would constitute a decent solution.

Clearly, the number of posts a person has on this site is no indicator of that person's competence in a given area. Equally clearly, a person who attempts to help, when that person is not competent to help, can cause serious difficulties for the person who is asking for the help.

How could people who offer help be vetted, such that a person seeking help could have some idea of who to listen to?

I don't think there is a good way to do it. I warn newbies as often as possible that the first piece of advice they encounter, whether on a forum, or using a search engine, is not necessarily good advice. I think it's just part of the learning curve. Anyone running an OS they are unfamiliar with, and committing irrecoverable data to it, is in for some hard lessons.

The only way a newbie could do it is to check out other posts by the person giving advice and judge whether they're competent and trustworthy. I'd only give advice if I was 99% (?) sure of what I was talking about.

From The Rules:
We would like to stress that you should fully understand what a recommended change may do to your system. ........ LinuxQuestions.org cannot be held liable for anything you do as a result of information obtained at this site.

There really is no way to know the level of help someone is able to give - we may, for example, have someone who is expert at Samba but knows little about configuring X. As this is a community, we should not be excluding anyone. Harsh as this will sound, the user you helped (and thank you for that, members who are able to provide the correct help are what makes this site what it is) will know in future to do a little research before diving in. Not her(?) fault, I think we've all done that in the past, but for anyone who is making a large or major change to their system they absolutely must be aware of what they are doing and what the effect will be.

If you think the advice given was malicious, let us know and we will deal with the poster. If it was just that s/he didn't understand what was being asked, then there really isn't anything we can do unfortunately.

And, as far as vetting helpers goes, we all (mods included, me especially) started out knowing next to nothing and discovered how to do things by trial and error and looking things up. The idea of 'karma points' or voting or whatever have been brought up but it's too hit and miss - there is the option there for vote rigging or for people being voted up incorrectly. Or voting down incorrectly - most of the mods would probably lose many many points for some of our decisions

What I see most often is that advice offered is basically OK, but maybe incomplete or confusing. If I can add something, I usually do.

I do not hesitate to question or correct something which appears wrong to me, and I really hope that I get corrected when I make a mistake.

In an ideal world, people do not offer advice when they really don't know the answer. We don't live in an ideal world.

As large, diverse, and complicated as these systems are, we certainly would expect that there is no uber-expert who can answer all questions. I personally will offer advice with certainty when I am certain, and with caveats when I am not, and I won't offer advice if I don't know.

But in the particular case, the advice offered was completely wrong but was offered in a tone of absolute certainty. Either the poster was malicious, or the poster has a truly giant ego and no concept whatsoever of what he knows and what his limitations are. I cannot say. What I can say is that the advice offered was completely (and, to me, obviously) wrong and it did compound the damage to the OP's system. To OP's credit (s)he was bold enough to be willing to follow instructions that involved hex editing and manual repairs to a partition table, thus the situation was salvaged.

Caveat emptor, of course, but had I been a newbie with minimal knowledge facing a problem I might well have been deceived by the poster's confident tone.

I dunno; maybe one of the mods would like to take a look at the thread and offer a second opinion. I haven't linked it but it isn't hard to find because it is recent and I had a bunch of posts on it by the time I was done.

Also, to add to my other comment, if a new user were to see that an "expert" had already responded (note, I don't say "answered") to a question, it could dissuade them from posting. The idea on LQ is that we're all equal here - helping and asking. Obviously, over time you get to see that some posters know more than others, but generally we should all be able to give advice on a fairly level footing.

Also, the fact that Jiml8 was able to jump in and save the day (no sarcasm intended, btw) shows that the system does work. Many eyes making all bugs shallow and all that.

I frequent a popular torrent site. They employ a ranking system, whereby if someone uploads something you enjoy/find useful then you click the ranking icon, choose positive/negative and you can leave a comment, although these comments are only viewable by admins the rating score is visible to everyone.

(sounding very similar to ebays feedback system as i think it through in my head)

Employed in this situation people could leave a positive/negative rating based on the assistance of the person.

Whilst this would not be 100% accurate ,it could give a good indication of someones competence/knowledge and ability to help people.

i guess you'd need a negative ranking to minus the score and there are other details to iron out, but if you were trying to implement it, that would be a way to do it.

Just been reading through the thread in question. You did a great job there, jiml8, not many - even if they had the knowledge - would have had the patience and consideration to do what you did.

Yeah, well I guess I'm just a sucker for a crying female.

Seriously, it looked to me like OP hadn't done anything wrong other than take the wrong advice.

As far as ranking people goes, there is a major flaw. It's the same one as the one for making threads answered/unanswered: in the vast majority of cases, thread posters don't even return to say "thanks for all your help, the advice from X in post#Y was what fixed my problem".

So, there is no guarantee that anyone would have any sort of rank at all. And, bearing in mind that potentially the example poster could have marked the advice they were given as "excellent" before realising that the advice has broken their PC.

Yeah, aren't we all?