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Solar said: What we have been complaining about, for years now, is the steady decline of quality discussion about design principles, technical details etc., and the ever growing percentage of "I can't get this to compile".
Solar, I agree. I'm new and I'm here for the quality discussion.
I'm trying to remember what it was like when I started out with my OS. I'm sure I would have been excited had I found this list then. I may even have asked some newbie questions. And probably got myself into trouble. Although I must admit, by the time I got to kernel land I'd been doing software for a while. Only had linker problems when I made a typo!
It strikes me that some of the newbies just don't understand the knowledge gap that they have. I suspect some of them think that their code is almost working when they post and that someone on the list will be able to point out their one silly error and everything will be fixed instantly. Clearly in many cases that's far from the truth.
Now, I know you guys must be frustrated after years of this but I also feel we need to let the newbies understand EXACTLY how much they have to learn. Perhaps we need to revamp the prerequisites list and make it more prominent so it simply cannot be missed on the way to the forum. Detail some very strict rules about what may be asked and what will and be answered. We need to move the newbies on until they reach a useful level of knowledge. Perhaps we can have a pre-written message that 'nicely' tells them that 'linker/compiler/whatever' problems won't be answered here and that if you have a problem like that that you can't solve elsewhere then you're just not ready. And perhaps we need to make sure that questions like that are not answered here.
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Combuster said: - Make an (unwritten) rule against all beginner questions, moderate the first few posts, and send a fixed reply by PM when it concerns a beginner or stfw question.
No sense having an unwritten rule. It needs to be a prominent written rule. And it should apply to answering questions as well as asking. By answering questions that should be asked elsewhere, we encourage more of the wrong type of questions
Finally Solar, if you've left already, I hope someone will contact you and convince you to come back.
- gerryg400