A plea for restraint

[Tom Neff]

In article <11601 at ulysses.homer.nj.att.com> jss at hector.UUCP (Jerry Schwarz) writes:
>Please, please, please double check your answers to questions.
>Recently there have been a rash of incidents where a beginner posts a
>question and answer is posted that appears to have been from another
>beginner and is completely wrong....

Let me second Jerry's comments (most of which I have deleted, but they 
were mild mannered) and suggest a few guidelines for posting to groups 
like this which tout le monde subscribe to. 

 * READ A C BOOK before posting questions here! Anyone with Usenet 
access and an interest in C programming should study Kernighan & 
Ritchie and/or Harbison & Steele thoroughly before posting anything to 
the newsgroup (and costing the net hundreds or thousands of dollars). 
Many (not all) of the beginners' questions posted here betray deep 
ignorance of the language and could have been answered more quickly 
and cheaply by cracking a book or leaning one's head into the office 
next door. Nobody is perfect, but there are reasonable measures one 
can take. 

 * WHEN DUMB QUESTIONS ARE POSTED ANYWAY, don't answer them via 
Followup articles in the newsgroup! This just generates more noise and 
expense. *MAIL*, repeat *MAIL* your reply to the person who posted the 
question. If the answer is of potential use to others, suggest in your 
mailed reply that the poster *summarize* responses to Netnews after 
they are collected and he has learned his lesson. NOTE: I am aware 
that mail is not always 100% reliable from Netnews, but when it comes 
to answering questions about how many elements "char a[33];" has, YOUR 
reply may not be the crucially vital one that must get through at all 
costs. :-) 

 * WHEN INTERESTING QUESTIONS ARE POSTED, which *will* happen all odds 
to the contrary :-), READ ALL FOLLOWUPS before posting your own! 
Someone may have completely addressed the issue before you. When 
something looks particularly juicy it's best to wait a day and THEN 
followup if no one else has covered it. Some wag will always point out 
that if EVERYONE waited a day we'd be in the same boat, etc etc, but 
in practice that's not how it works. Doug or Chris will nail the 
tough-but-interesting queries with 95% accuracy and your followup may 
only be needed to smooth out the edges. 

 * WHEN YOU POST C CODE as an example or counterexample or whatever, 
COMPILE AND RUN IT to make sure it works as-is!! Nothing is more 
frustrating (or more likely to generate kilobytes of repetitive 
scolding followups) than a typo-filled C fragment someone "winged" on 
the fly in the news editor without actually testing. 

 * MAKE A LIST OF GURU NAMES and netmail addresses as you read the 
newsgroup. If you have a C question, you can *MAIL* it to three or 
four people and be 95% certain of getting a good reply WITHOUT costing 
Usenet kilobucks. If you use this method you don't even have to worry 
whether it's a DUMB question or not. 

-- 

Remember, Netnews is a precious resource which costs people bucks. The 
above guidelines are gentle suggestions on how to conserve and 
optimize the resource. Happy coding! 

-- 
Tom Neff				UUCP:     ...!uunet!bfmny0!tneff
    "Truisms aren't everything."	Internet: tneff at bfmny0.UU.NET