I agree 100%. I admit there have been times where I saw a question where it seemed evident that the person didn't have a clue and probably didn't do even 5 minutes of searching to try to find the answer. I don't criticize them or slam them, I just ignore them. Hopefully the silence will force them to figure it out or someone with more patience than me will offer help.

That said, I do understand that sometimes a person just needs a little push in the right direction. I was not following the thread in question, but if he thought that the UART handled multiple characters rather than just single questions then it can be a big help to have someone say "The UART only deals with single characters. Reading SBUF returns the last character received and writing to it will write one character to the UART, and you cannot write another character to SBUF until the previous one has been completely sent. See chapter X for details, or read the serial tutorial." That gives the person a very general overview so he knows what he's going to be reading.

Reading something that you know nothing about--or worse, you think you know about but are competely wrong--can be very confusing even if the information is right there. A general overview or summary (i.e "pointing them in the right direction") can be very useful and needn't take that much time.

It's also sometimes hard to know where to start. Certainly the tutorials and/or the Bible are good ideas, but sometimes what a person needs is just for someone to recognize that the person is lost, point him in the right direction, and tell him what to read. Telling the person to read something without giving him a little direction is generally going to be a lot less useful.

It's also not impossible that someone reads the tutorials and/or the Bible but, for whatever reason, the writing styles of the documents just didn't "click" with the person. Maybe he or she just needs someone to explain it in other words. If you get right down to it, I'll bet the answers to 99.9% of the questions we discuss in this forum can be found if one searches Google with enough diligence and can put 2 and 2 together--so if we want to be really brutal we could just ignore every question on the basis that if someone is asking the question, they obviously didn't Google and think about it enough.

Anyway, I guess I started ranting. I think we should be patient with people. If we are not patient, we should just ignore them and let those that are patient help the person who has what appears to be a very obvious question. If no-one helps the person, the silence will force the person to search and get the answer himself--in which case the problem is self-correcting.

Regards,
Craig Steiner