On Tuesday 25 June 2002 09:40, Brian W. Carver wrote:
I wonder if SuSE would consider assigning/hiring an employee to respond to unanswered requests to this list on a weekly basis. <SNIP>
Maybe I am misinterpreting what you are saying, but neither SuSE nor the list
members have any obligation to answer questions. I have personally asked
questions before to which I never received an answer, even after reposting
it. It's frustrating, but that is the way it is on any list.
Often the questions that I see that are either too vague ("<whatever> is not
working correctly. What's wrong?") or too complex ("How do I set up a
firewall?"). In the first case, the list has no idea what the user has
already done, what error messages appear and so forth. Should we really waste
our time by repeating the comment dozens of times a days "Give us more
information"? In the later case, it is unclear what the technical level of
the user is. I have seen questions along those lines where the poster did not
even have an understanding of basic networking concepts. Should we really
spend our time explaining what a netmask is or what different protocols are
even before we start explaining how to set up a firewall?
While I support your idea to post a [SOLVED]-message, the entire rest bothers
me. You said "devote one day a week". Do you have the time to devote an
entire day, as that is what it would take? If you are the Tuesday-person and
there is a dead thread on a subject you know nothing about what do you do? If
you have some "obligation" to solve the problem, you will probably need to
do some research to find the solution. Why shouldn't the poster do the
research? Personally, considering the amount of time many people devote to
this list **for free** we all need to be very grateful.
I remember a question several months ago about some error when the driver for
a specific network card loaded. It was first posted to the SuSE and a few
days later to the Linux-Newbie list. Neither was answered. I did not know the
answer, but I was still curious just what the posted had done to find the
answer himself. I did a search on Google for the complete text of the error
message. Sure enough, I found dozens of pages that directly answered the
question. Why should SuSE pay someone to search Google or why should the list
members do it for someone else?
I don't think it is the responsibility of either SuSE or the list to "push
things towards a solution", but rather the original poster. If a message has
gone unswered for a week and the original poster has done nothing during that
week to find an answer himself, why should SuSE or the list take the time to
do the research?
Another problem I see is that some list members get annoyed and publically
voice their annoyance when they post a question and the answer is simply
man