I generally agree, Richard. I definitely agree that we should motivate people to make the effort to learn themselves rather than spoon-feeding them the answers they're looking for.

In practice, I'm not sure there's any way to avoid it. Anyone that is intent on posting a question is going to post their question. We might eliminate some of them by complicating the process, but we're also going to make it harder for the rest of us to start a new thread. Every time a thread is started, the member is presented with some questions and recommendations that they should follow before asking the question. Clearly, those are being ignored.

If someone wants to learn, they're going to learn. If they aren't interested in learning or are too lazy, I don't think we are going to be able to change that. But we can be friendly anyway.

I do somewhat understand *some* of the requests we receive and some of the frustration we see. If someone asks a question, being told to read a 50-page document can be overwhelming and while the answer may very well be in there, the person may feel that they're wasting their time and not even read it. Basically, I've been in situations where I had a question that, if answered, would help me understand something at a very high level that would make lots of other things make sense. Sure, the answers are embedded in lots of different places, but until someone assures you that you have some particular knowledge correct, reading 50+ pages might leave you more confused than you were before. If you go into it with some general questions already answered, many other things would make sense.

I'd personally like to see the FAQ section be significantly expanded. I think the current approach in the FAQ is solid: Present the question, answer it in the FAQ, and provide links to past relevant discussions in the message forum. I'd like to see dozens or even hundreds more FAQ entries that cover what we always see. At that point, I might be moved to make a modification so that when a new thread is started, the system will try to parse out the contents of the message being created and present possible entires in the FAQ that might answer the question. If none of them do, the user can proceed to post his message. I don't want to do that now because the FAQ section is too small for that to work effectively, and searching the message forum could return hundreds of hits that may or may not be relevant, but which could definitely overwhelm the user with laziness to look through each one (and that's understandable).

But if someone posts a question about "Why isn't my LCD cursor positioning where I tell it to?" and, before the message is created, the system says, "There's a FAQ called: How to position the cursor on an LCD", does that answer your question? It's going to be a lot more likely that the person will actually read that link since it's exactly what he's looking for.

But we need more FAQ entries and I don't have the time to write hundreds more myself right now. I invite people to write FAQs on their areas of expertise and submit them to the system. Once we get a large enough FAQ system, I'll look into making the message forum search the FAQ database for potential hits before allowing the user to start a new thread.

Personally, I'm not going to tell people how to respond. If you want to give code to someone that's asking for code, go for it. If you want to help motivate them in a friendly way to figure it out themselves, go for it. But what I don't want to see is mocking or rude responses. There's just no need for that, even if we have seen the question a hundred times before.

Next time you see a question that has been asked a hundred times before, take a few moments and respond to it in the FAQ database. Submit it. I'll authorize it for inclusion and then you can reply to the thread and tell him that his response is in the FAQ database. And next time the question is asked, the FAQ entry will already be there.

Regards,
Craig Steiner
8052.com Webmaster