Didn't take the time to search or read other posts in this thread, but I did read the OP's entry. I'd just like to say that learning to use Forums, BBS, etc. was best explained at How to Ask Questions the Smart Way by Eric S. Raymond and Rick Moen.

If we all actually read that article, without an offended chip on the shoulder, we'd learn a lot more about how to intelligently get and give better questions and answers.

The first post was a bit of a difficult read, but someone amongst those I see replied most surely pointed that out somehow.

It's not laziness in terms of labor. It's laziness in terms of mind, in terms of initiative.

In fact, sometimes I've seen some of these "lazy" people work really hard to describe their problems, often typing out a several-paragraph-long post and ten or twelve follow-up posts. The labor involved in writing those posts is actually much more than typing the error message in Google and getting the answer.

The laziness lies not in the fact that the user doesn't want to do any work, but in that she doesn't want to have to figure out what kind of work to do. It's really the desire to be spoonfed.

Communication is a two-way street. To get good answers, even someone fresh off the turnip truck has a responsibility to ask good questions.

My limited study of behavior on this forum is that the "RTFM" response comes most often to gems like: "How can I become a Linux expert?"---and of course the clowns who cut and paste their homework assignment into a new thread.

The harder cases are those in which the OP has a limited grasp of English (sadly, this includes a large population where it is their first language) While some residents here will blow these off, I am impressed at how patient MOST of us are with the communcation-impaired set.

I admit to the occassional RTM (not RTFM), and the periodic TEMPTATION for something way beyond RTFM. For the most part, I think it is most helpful to give a few hints, answers, etc. and then point the OP to more info. In the limit, is totally valid to say something like: I don't know the answer, but here are sime hints as to how to find it."

Especially with the vager questions I either ignore them completely (if someone can't be a***d to ask a decent question why should I bother to write a response at all) or, where it is evident (to me) that there must be a valid question somewhere in the asker's mind I try the 'what exactly are you asking' approach, maybe giving a couple of options however wild and different they may be just to show that unless a better question is asked no other answer can be given...

There is a "body language' that goes with a post. This has a lot to do with how we respond--and perhaps a lot of it is subconscious.

If the body language is positive, I have no objection to helping someone who could have found the answer in 3 minutes on Google. Bad body language decreases the probablity of help.
The body language includes:
use of english
completeness of the question
courtesy
other factors (eg "urgent", or "Please e-mail me")

Helping people here is maybe like teaching. Our role can be answering simple questions, but it should also be helping people find things beyond what we tell them.
And teaching is always more rewarding when the students actually want to learn....

I like the way you put it. The body language can be tricky though if the writer is foreign and his command of the English language rather less than sparse.

As for the teaching bit, I find that as often as not it is abouit helping peo`ple understand what it is theya are actually asking. Knowing the question is 50% of the asnwer (it doesn't work the other way round though, or is there anyone who has found out the real question to 42 yet?)

What's frightening is that some day this thread will be moved off the top 10 pages and someone will start a thread bemoaning the fact that a) we say "RTFM" or "Google it" and b) someone else will say "no one ever searches for anything"

But sometimes you just gotta overlook the body odor and give it your best shot ....

I quite agree.

However, as a not-quite-newbie, I frequently scan the 0 Reply threads to see if I can help. I often end up Googling / searching the man pages myself to find an answer, and I have learnt a lot by doing this. I then often point the person asking the question to the resources I have used, to help them to know where to look in future.

I agree that knowing how to ask the question is often a large part of solving the problem, and asking the right question of Google (so that the information you want is somewhere close to the top) is not always easy. It is also useful to explain what the commands to which you direct people actually do. It takes a bit of effort to, and I have been guilty of not doing it, but it can be irritating to just be told "type somecomp -let e_gibberish at the command line" when you have no idea what you have just typed.

Showing others how to do things is a good way of consolidating your own knowledge, and while some of the more experienced users will have come across a particular question several dozen times, there will be many of us who have not.

Rob

Maybe a hint for doing google searches, that filters a lot of the useless results for a linux related search..
like to use the little advertised Linux specialised search, could be added to a general FAQ for finding help prior to asking a question.

Most people, specially newbies, find man pages to be practically useless, the information is there, but they don't have the knowledge base to interpret it effectively, so I never answer with a rtfm when it's someone just learning Linux.

it might be more accurate to say several thousand times.
I may be new to LQ, but I've been using Linux for 8 years, and only Linux for 7.

Why answer the same damn question every single day?

Does "which distro" really need to be asked, and answered, 5 to 10 times a DAY?

Does "how do I partition my disk" or "what's a partition" need to be asked and answered every DAY?

Does "how do I play DVDs in SuSE" need to be asked every damn day?

It's a search away. If you don't get it, check out http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html - it gets the point across to the lazy people who have no regard for netiquette than Chinaman's suggestion does. Some people don't WANT to do the basics on their own - and those people do not deserve any help. You have to be willing to do SOME digging on your own. heck, back when I was in M$ support, we were instructed not to answer RTFM questions, but to point callers to the page with the "fine" answer - and ditto for issues covered in the online help. Of course, that was back when Windows came with a real manual, and not just a marketing brochure.

Because the really clueless newbies a) have trouble figuring out what question to ask, and b) lack the sophistictation to search on Google AND interpret the results. (Google produces a low information to data ratio--you have to know what to look for)

If I elected dictator, I would:
Allow maybe 2-3 posts which are really naive, lazy, etc. (Note that large percent of such things come from OPs that only post once or twice and are never heard from again)
After this "grace period", I would insert some kined of screen where the poster had to check a box to indicate where they had searched. If they checked nothing, the would not be stopped--it would simply serve as a gentle reminder that searching first might be useful.
I would include in every forum about 3-5 "stickies" on the most common topics. For example, I believe that "Newbie" would greatly benefit from a sticky on dual-booting.

Probably not, but then many people have the same question. If it really gets on your nerves you might consider writing a short tutorial for LQ so that ever time the question comes up you can redirect the person there.

To be quite honest, I find some of the existing tutorial very intersting, but somehow difficult to find. There's something in the way they ate organised and named I can't quite put my finfer on that doesn't really make it attractive to check if there's a tutorial available for my pasticular question.

That's a good point.
Why do you figure people ask the same question over and over?

There is a problem with that. The people who ask the same questions over and over again don't want to read. If someone would search the distro forum, I am sure there is not which distro for this hardware question that has not been asked. A two minute scroll in that forum would have answered there question, but they don't do it. The problem is that everyone wants to feel like they "belong" in a group. If they search for the answer and find it, and never post a question, alot of people like they don't belong to the "group". I have been doing some study on human behavior and check up on it, my remarks are true.