A question of etiquette
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Hello all, I receive lots of direct emails every day from people asking for help, commenting on my articles, asking questions about something on my article etc. and I believe that I am not alone here. Initially I used to respond to some of them depending on how free I am, and to the others I used to reply politely asking them to post in one of the forums. But nowadays I find that the number of mails is increasing and as a rule I simply delete direct mails from people I do not know well. Is this proper etiquette? I mean I know that they themselves are being impolite by directly mailing me without posting in the forums, but am I correct in my attitude? If so I am thinking of creating a template email that explains why people should post in the forums and why they shouldn’t mail people directly. What are your thoughts on this? Regards, Nish p.s. I feel particularly aggravated when people send me zipped projects and with my slow bandwidth this is a really horrible thing to experience.
Author of the romantic comedy Summer Love and Some more Cricket [New Win] Review by Shog9 Click here for review[NW]
Nishant S wrote: What are your thoughts on this? My thoughts:
- If the message is related to an article or post you've made, it is polite to reply.
- If the message is not related to anything you've posted, it would be gracious of you to send some standard reply noting that they would stand a better chance of getting answered were they to post on the public forums
- If the message includes a zipped attachment, you would be entitled to use rather sharp words in informing the sender that yours is not the upload address for
reallybrokenandprobablytotallyhopelesslyunreadablecode.com - Get a web-based email interface so you don't have to download messages and their attachments before you can delete them
When it comes right down to it, it's your time, bandwidth, and storage space - what with public forums, article forums, and now personal forums on CP, there are plenty of ways for someone to contact you without using email; if they don't have a good reason and they piss you off, by all means just delete and forget. (admission: i tend to be rather too zealous in deleting emails myself though; often i'll read and delete an email, only remembering later on that i meant to reply... :( )
Shog9 ------
And on the pedestal, these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings, Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains.
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Hello all, I receive lots of direct emails every day from people asking for help, commenting on my articles, asking questions about something on my article etc. and I believe that I am not alone here. Initially I used to respond to some of them depending on how free I am, and to the others I used to reply politely asking them to post in one of the forums. But nowadays I find that the number of mails is increasing and as a rule I simply delete direct mails from people I do not know well. Is this proper etiquette? I mean I know that they themselves are being impolite by directly mailing me without posting in the forums, but am I correct in my attitude? If so I am thinking of creating a template email that explains why people should post in the forums and why they shouldn’t mail people directly. What are your thoughts on this? Regards, Nish p.s. I feel particularly aggravated when people send me zipped projects and with my slow bandwidth this is a really horrible thing to experience.
Author of the romantic comedy Summer Love and Some more Cricket [New Win] Review by Shog9 Click here for review[NW]
I get this all the time, too, although my CP visibility has dropped off the scale in recent times. My opinion - everyone deserves a reply, they took the time to ask your help because you've put yourself in the public eye. The more they ask of me, the more I expect them to be polite and to ASK, not just tell me what they want, but if I decide no, I will write back and say so. Having said that, I have an email in my inbox that has been there two days because I intend on mocking up a project to answer the question, but have not found time. But as a matter of policy, I always try to reply, and try to help where-ever I think people have asked in a way that shows they realise they are asking a decent sort of favour of me. Christian Hey, at least Logo had, at it's inception, a mechanical turtle. VB has always lacked even that... - Shog9 04-09-2002 During last 10 years, with invention of VB and similar programming environments, every ill-educated moron became able to develop software. - Alex E. - 12-Sept-2002
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Hello all, I receive lots of direct emails every day from people asking for help, commenting on my articles, asking questions about something on my article etc. and I believe that I am not alone here. Initially I used to respond to some of them depending on how free I am, and to the others I used to reply politely asking them to post in one of the forums. But nowadays I find that the number of mails is increasing and as a rule I simply delete direct mails from people I do not know well. Is this proper etiquette? I mean I know that they themselves are being impolite by directly mailing me without posting in the forums, but am I correct in my attitude? If so I am thinking of creating a template email that explains why people should post in the forums and why they shouldn’t mail people directly. What are your thoughts on this? Regards, Nish p.s. I feel particularly aggravated when people send me zipped projects and with my slow bandwidth this is a really horrible thing to experience.
Author of the romantic comedy Summer Love and Some more Cricket [New Win] Review by Shog9 Click here for review[NW]
I agree with Shog. Unless it is a direct query on one of my articles I tend to delete and forget. If it is in response to a post I made in one of the forums, I will ask the sender to repost on the forum that the discussion originally started on, unless the post was of a private nature.
CPUA 0x5041 Sonork 100.11743 Chicken Little "So it can now be written in stone as a testament to humanities achievments "PJ did Pi at CP"." Colin Davies Within you lies the power for good - Use it!
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Hello all, I receive lots of direct emails every day from people asking for help, commenting on my articles, asking questions about something on my article etc. and I believe that I am not alone here. Initially I used to respond to some of them depending on how free I am, and to the others I used to reply politely asking them to post in one of the forums. But nowadays I find that the number of mails is increasing and as a rule I simply delete direct mails from people I do not know well. Is this proper etiquette? I mean I know that they themselves are being impolite by directly mailing me without posting in the forums, but am I correct in my attitude? If so I am thinking of creating a template email that explains why people should post in the forums and why they shouldn’t mail people directly. What are your thoughts on this? Regards, Nish p.s. I feel particularly aggravated when people send me zipped projects and with my slow bandwidth this is a really horrible thing to experience.
Author of the romantic comedy Summer Love and Some more Cricket [New Win] Review by Shog9 Click here for review[NW]
Nishant S wrote: I receive lots of direct emails every day from people asking for help, commenting on my articles, asking questions about something on my article etc. and I believe that I am not alone here. You're not alone. I wouldn't say I receive lots of them though; I average 1-2 per month. Nishant S wrote: But nowadays I find that the number of mails is increasing and as a rule I simply delete direct mails from people I do not know well. Is this proper etiquette? I think it's borderline; the person would be expecting a reply back of some sort but if you're getting a lot of e-mails like this you can't reply back to them all. If there was an option to have all messages sent via the "e-mail author" links go to a particular address, and keep notifications going where they go now then you (or I ;)) could set up an auto-responder so the person gets your formal reply to use the forums. Currently CP uses two e-mail address, 1 is used for the e-mail links and notifications for your posts and the newsletter and the other is used for the e-mail links and notifications for your articles. My proposal adds a 3rd e-mail address which is used only for the "e-mail author" links.
James Sig code stolen from David Wulff
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Hello all, I receive lots of direct emails every day from people asking for help, commenting on my articles, asking questions about something on my article etc. and I believe that I am not alone here. Initially I used to respond to some of them depending on how free I am, and to the others I used to reply politely asking them to post in one of the forums. But nowadays I find that the number of mails is increasing and as a rule I simply delete direct mails from people I do not know well. Is this proper etiquette? I mean I know that they themselves are being impolite by directly mailing me without posting in the forums, but am I correct in my attitude? If so I am thinking of creating a template email that explains why people should post in the forums and why they shouldn’t mail people directly. What are your thoughts on this? Regards, Nish p.s. I feel particularly aggravated when people send me zipped projects and with my slow bandwidth this is a really horrible thing to experience.
Author of the romantic comedy Summer Love and Some more Cricket [New Win] Review by Shog9 Click here for review[NW]
Believe it or not, from what I experienced it hurted more my corresponders when I told him/her to post their questions in a forum (so answers could benefit more people), than no responding at all. Nish you also forgot to mention that most people don't even thank you for the answers. I feel people are a bit shameless. Not only they want free support and expect us solve efficiently, fastly, and accurately THEIR problems (for which they are paid for), they also don't even take the chance to ask it nicely, in a dedicated forum instead of an article comment having not much to do with it. What has been hurting me more lately is people not even taking the time to ask a question accurately. While at the same time, they still expect a "copy/paste" answer. Anyway, that's it.
She's so dirty, she threw a boomerang and it wouldn't even come back.
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Hello all, I receive lots of direct emails every day from people asking for help, commenting on my articles, asking questions about something on my article etc. and I believe that I am not alone here. Initially I used to respond to some of them depending on how free I am, and to the others I used to reply politely asking them to post in one of the forums. But nowadays I find that the number of mails is increasing and as a rule I simply delete direct mails from people I do not know well. Is this proper etiquette? I mean I know that they themselves are being impolite by directly mailing me without posting in the forums, but am I correct in my attitude? If so I am thinking of creating a template email that explains why people should post in the forums and why they shouldn’t mail people directly. What are your thoughts on this? Regards, Nish p.s. I feel particularly aggravated when people send me zipped projects and with my slow bandwidth this is a really horrible thing to experience.
Author of the romantic comedy Summer Love and Some more Cricket [New Win] Review by Shog9 Click here for review[NW]
Seems to me it's two-fold(but then I'm far from being a guru :) ). It's really cool that people feel you are a guru who can answer all their problems (well, for the ego), but unless you have advertised yourself as free debugger slave to all CPians, I would say that sending you zip files is really going overboard and that such action is not deserving of a polite reply. :suss:
Dave Goodman on funny error messages:
It is a definite no-no to run BITMAP as a user command. Your nose will grow, your lawn will die, your hair will fall out, and your first-born will marry an aardvark. Shame on you! -
Hello all, I receive lots of direct emails every day from people asking for help, commenting on my articles, asking questions about something on my article etc. and I believe that I am not alone here. Initially I used to respond to some of them depending on how free I am, and to the others I used to reply politely asking them to post in one of the forums. But nowadays I find that the number of mails is increasing and as a rule I simply delete direct mails from people I do not know well. Is this proper etiquette? I mean I know that they themselves are being impolite by directly mailing me without posting in the forums, but am I correct in my attitude? If so I am thinking of creating a template email that explains why people should post in the forums and why they shouldn’t mail people directly. What are your thoughts on this? Regards, Nish p.s. I feel particularly aggravated when people send me zipped projects and with my slow bandwidth this is a really horrible thing to experience.
Author of the romantic comedy Summer Love and Some more Cricket [New Win] Review by Shog9 Click here for review[NW]
Nish, A. I think you should make a mention in the articles for all correspondence about "that" article to take place in the forum provided. B. Consider making a super standard response up to reply to these people. ( as some of them could get nasty and not buy your books in the future) :-) C. If you wanna make sure this doesn't happen use a pseudonym which unfortunatly means you won't get any fame as well. Also sometimes people write polite emails and use etiquette which is totally different to those that demand you solve their problems. So each has to be taken on their merits. Regardz Colin J Davies
Sonork ID 100.9197:Colin
You are the intrepid one, always willing to leap into the fray! A serious character flaw, I might add, but entertaining. Said by Roger Wright about me.
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Hello all, I receive lots of direct emails every day from people asking for help, commenting on my articles, asking questions about something on my article etc. and I believe that I am not alone here. Initially I used to respond to some of them depending on how free I am, and to the others I used to reply politely asking them to post in one of the forums. But nowadays I find that the number of mails is increasing and as a rule I simply delete direct mails from people I do not know well. Is this proper etiquette? I mean I know that they themselves are being impolite by directly mailing me without posting in the forums, but am I correct in my attitude? If so I am thinking of creating a template email that explains why people should post in the forums and why they shouldn’t mail people directly. What are your thoughts on this? Regards, Nish p.s. I feel particularly aggravated when people send me zipped projects and with my slow bandwidth this is a really horrible thing to experience.
Author of the romantic comedy Summer Love and Some more Cricket [New Win] Review by Shog9 Click here for review[NW]
One side of this is that some people are completely ignorant of etiquette, or may just be casual visitors, and do not understand that you don't actually work for CP, or some such thing. It doesn't do anybody any good to strictly ignore the request, and if you're going to reply, it is just as much effort to explain why they should post to the forums, and that you simply don't have the time to help them in great detail, as it is to send a flame-o-gram. If you can't help them, or don't want to, I think your return template email is completely acceptable. I realize, its easy for me to suggest this, as I'm never asked for help in this way. (nor am I much position to give it, regarding C++) :-O BW The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to talk, mad to live, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding. - Jack Kerouac
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Hello all, I receive lots of direct emails every day from people asking for help, commenting on my articles, asking questions about something on my article etc. and I believe that I am not alone here. Initially I used to respond to some of them depending on how free I am, and to the others I used to reply politely asking them to post in one of the forums. But nowadays I find that the number of mails is increasing and as a rule I simply delete direct mails from people I do not know well. Is this proper etiquette? I mean I know that they themselves are being impolite by directly mailing me without posting in the forums, but am I correct in my attitude? If so I am thinking of creating a template email that explains why people should post in the forums and why they shouldn’t mail people directly. What are your thoughts on this? Regards, Nish p.s. I feel particularly aggravated when people send me zipped projects and with my slow bandwidth this is a really horrible thing to experience.
Author of the romantic comedy Summer Love and Some more Cricket [New Win] Review by Shog9 Click here for review[NW]
That does raise a point - are there email clients that can be set to accept emails up to a certain size (including attachment) ? I looked at the options on Outlook Express 6 and there doesn't seem to be an option for that. Elaine (fluffy tigress emoticon) Would you like to meet my teddy bear ?
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Seems to me it's two-fold(but then I'm far from being a guru :) ). It's really cool that people feel you are a guru who can answer all their problems (well, for the ego), but unless you have advertised yourself as free debugger slave to all CPians, I would say that sending you zip files is really going overboard and that such action is not deserving of a polite reply. :suss:
Dave Goodman on funny error messages:
It is a definite no-no to run BITMAP as a user command. Your nose will grow, your lawn will die, your hair will fall out, and your first-born will marry an aardvark. Shame on you!Megan Forbes wrote: It's really cool that people feel you are a guru who can answer all their problems Believe me, that feeling subsides quickly. :| Jeremy Falcon Imputek "Oh no there was a knife in that kitchen drawer and I cut myself - please remove the kitchen." - David Wulff
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Believe it or not, from what I experienced it hurted more my corresponders when I told him/her to post their questions in a forum (so answers could benefit more people), than no responding at all. Nish you also forgot to mention that most people don't even thank you for the answers. I feel people are a bit shameless. Not only they want free support and expect us solve efficiently, fastly, and accurately THEIR problems (for which they are paid for), they also don't even take the chance to ask it nicely, in a dedicated forum instead of an article comment having not much to do with it. What has been hurting me more lately is people not even taking the time to ask a question accurately. While at the same time, they still expect a "copy/paste" answer. Anyway, that's it.
She's so dirty, she threw a boomerang and it wouldn't even come back.
__Stephane Rodriguez__ wrote: I feel people are a bit shameless. Not only they want free support and expect us solve efficiently, fastly, and accurately THEIR problems (for which they are paid for), I feel the same way. I want to help, but I also feel most people are just takers. What's worse, some simply don't want to try and figure it out for themselves, just let it be answered by someone else. That's the wrong attitude IMO. :( Jeremy Falcon Imputek "Oh no there was a knife in that kitchen drawer and I cut myself - please remove the kitchen." - David Wulff
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That does raise a point - are there email clients that can be set to accept emails up to a certain size (including attachment) ? I looked at the options on Outlook Express 6 and there doesn't seem to be an option for that. Elaine (fluffy tigress emoticon) Would you like to meet my teddy bear ?
Use Tools/Message rules/Mail. There's a rule which allows you to specify limit on size and there's one for attachments as well. Tomasz Sowinski -- http://www.shooltz.com
*** Si fractum non sit, noli id reficere. ***
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Hello all, I receive lots of direct emails every day from people asking for help, commenting on my articles, asking questions about something on my article etc. and I believe that I am not alone here. Initially I used to respond to some of them depending on how free I am, and to the others I used to reply politely asking them to post in one of the forums. But nowadays I find that the number of mails is increasing and as a rule I simply delete direct mails from people I do not know well. Is this proper etiquette? I mean I know that they themselves are being impolite by directly mailing me without posting in the forums, but am I correct in my attitude? If so I am thinking of creating a template email that explains why people should post in the forums and why they shouldn’t mail people directly. What are your thoughts on this? Regards, Nish p.s. I feel particularly aggravated when people send me zipped projects and with my slow bandwidth this is a really horrible thing to experience.
Author of the romantic comedy Summer Love and Some more Cricket [New Win] Review by Shog9 Click here for review[NW]
Nishant S wrote: p.s. I feel particularly aggravated when people send me zipped projects and with my slow bandwidth this is a really horrible thing to experience. Who's your ISP and do they give you shell access with your account? You could write a program/script to intercept attached zip files in your inbox and automatically delete them from the server ya know. :) Jeremy Falcon Imputek "Oh no there was a knife in that kitchen drawer and I cut myself - please remove the kitchen." - David Wulff
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I get this all the time, too, although my CP visibility has dropped off the scale in recent times. My opinion - everyone deserves a reply, they took the time to ask your help because you've put yourself in the public eye. The more they ask of me, the more I expect them to be polite and to ASK, not just tell me what they want, but if I decide no, I will write back and say so. Having said that, I have an email in my inbox that has been there two days because I intend on mocking up a project to answer the question, but have not found time. But as a matter of policy, I always try to reply, and try to help where-ever I think people have asked in a way that shows they realise they are asking a decent sort of favour of me. Christian Hey, at least Logo had, at it's inception, a mechanical turtle. VB has always lacked even that... - Shog9 04-09-2002 During last 10 years, with invention of VB and similar programming environments, every ill-educated moron became able to develop software. - Alex E. - 12-Sept-2002
Christian Graus wrote: but if I decide no, I will write back and say so. Same here, but then again, I don't get many emails like that. Jeremy Falcon Imputek "Oh no there was a knife in that kitchen drawer and I cut myself - please remove the kitchen." - David Wulff
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Hello all, I receive lots of direct emails every day from people asking for help, commenting on my articles, asking questions about something on my article etc. and I believe that I am not alone here. Initially I used to respond to some of them depending on how free I am, and to the others I used to reply politely asking them to post in one of the forums. But nowadays I find that the number of mails is increasing and as a rule I simply delete direct mails from people I do not know well. Is this proper etiquette? I mean I know that they themselves are being impolite by directly mailing me without posting in the forums, but am I correct in my attitude? If so I am thinking of creating a template email that explains why people should post in the forums and why they shouldn’t mail people directly. What are your thoughts on this? Regards, Nish p.s. I feel particularly aggravated when people send me zipped projects and with my slow bandwidth this is a really horrible thing to experience.
Author of the romantic comedy Summer Love and Some more Cricket [New Win] Review by Shog9 Click here for review[NW]
delete the emails. don't encourage the senders. if you answer their first question, they usually think you're going to be their personal tutor indefinitely. or...send them an invoice for your time. charge $60/hr, or so. -c
Green's Law of Debate: Anything is possible if you don't know what you're talking about.
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Believe it or not, from what I experienced it hurted more my corresponders when I told him/her to post their questions in a forum (so answers could benefit more people), than no responding at all. Nish you also forgot to mention that most people don't even thank you for the answers. I feel people are a bit shameless. Not only they want free support and expect us solve efficiently, fastly, and accurately THEIR problems (for which they are paid for), they also don't even take the chance to ask it nicely, in a dedicated forum instead of an article comment having not much to do with it. What has been hurting me more lately is people not even taking the time to ask a question accurately. While at the same time, they still expect a "copy/paste" answer. Anyway, that's it.
She's so dirty, she threw a boomerang and it wouldn't even come back.
__Stephane Rodriguez__ wrote: Nish you also forgot to mention that most people don't even thank you for the answers. I actually find that the majority of people DO thank me for the time I take to answer them. __Stephane Rodriguez__ wrote: I feel people are a bit shameless. Not only they want free support and expect us solve efficiently, fastly, and accurately THEIR problems (for which they are paid for), they also don't even take the chance to ask it nicely, in a dedicated forum instead of an article comment having not much to do with it. The key word is *nicely*. If people DO ask nicely, I think they deserve an answer. Christian Hey, at least Logo had, at it's inception, a mechanical turtle. VB has always lacked even that... - Shog9 04-09-2002 During last 10 years, with invention of VB and similar programming environments, every ill-educated moron became able to develop software. - Alex E. - 12-Sept-2002
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delete the emails. don't encourage the senders. if you answer their first question, they usually think you're going to be their personal tutor indefinitely. or...send them an invoice for your time. charge $60/hr, or so. -c
Green's Law of Debate: Anything is possible if you don't know what you're talking about.
You don't think that posting articles places you in the public eye and sets you up for this sort of contact ? In my experience, only one person who I have helped proceeded to send me zip after zip, and I told that person they needed to learn to stand on their own feet, and that I had no time to be their personal tutor. But most people just thank me and move on. Christian Hey, at least Logo had, at it's inception, a mechanical turtle. VB has always lacked even that... - Shog9 04-09-2002 During last 10 years, with invention of VB and similar programming environments, every ill-educated moron became able to develop software. - Alex E. - 12-Sept-2002
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You don't think that posting articles places you in the public eye and sets you up for this sort of contact ? In my experience, only one person who I have helped proceeded to send me zip after zip, and I told that person they needed to learn to stand on their own feet, and that I had no time to be their personal tutor. But most people just thank me and move on. Christian Hey, at least Logo had, at it's inception, a mechanical turtle. VB has always lacked even that... - Shog9 04-09-2002 During last 10 years, with invention of VB and similar programming environments, every ill-educated moron became able to develop software. - Alex E. - 12-Sept-2002
Christian Graus wrote: You don't think that posting articles places you in the public eye and sets you up for this sort of contact ? sets me up, sure, but that doesn't mean i have to like it. i give a lot, and i don't mind. but i prefer to do it on my own terms. -c
Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life. -- George Bernard Shaw
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Use Tools/Message rules/Mail. There's a rule which allows you to specify limit on size and there's one for attachments as well. Tomasz Sowinski -- http://www.shooltz.com
*** Si fractum non sit, noli id reficere. ***
The only problem is that OE will first download the message (even big ones) and then apply the rules. It would be handier if the rules were applied *before* you spent the time downloading the message.
CPUA 0x5041 Sonork 100.11743 Chicken Little "So it can now be written in stone as a testament to humanities achievments "PJ did Pi at CP"." Colin Davies Within you lies the power for good - Use it!
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__Stephane Rodriguez__ wrote: Nish you also forgot to mention that most people don't even thank you for the answers. I actually find that the majority of people DO thank me for the time I take to answer them. __Stephane Rodriguez__ wrote: I feel people are a bit shameless. Not only they want free support and expect us solve efficiently, fastly, and accurately THEIR problems (for which they are paid for), they also don't even take the chance to ask it nicely, in a dedicated forum instead of an article comment having not much to do with it. The key word is *nicely*. If people DO ask nicely, I think they deserve an answer. Christian Hey, at least Logo had, at it's inception, a mechanical turtle. VB has always lacked even that... - Shog9 04-09-2002 During last 10 years, with invention of VB and similar programming environments, every ill-educated moron became able to develop software. - Alex E. - 12-Sept-2002
I haven't encountered much the things you depict, sadly. People don't really care about you, and the way they ask the question(s). People just live with their own little problems, and that's actually what they share. From what I see in what lotsa CP people answer here is that askers don't give a shit about learning to do something. They just care about be able to "copy/paste" so they go on with next problem. Not really sharing among a community, just free answers actually. (same stuff seen for MS or \MS NGs, personal website, ...)
She's so dirty, she threw a boomerang and it wouldn't even come back.
