??? 11/29/08 13:19 Read: times |
#160407 - The universal truth again Responding to: ???'s previous message |
It is the universal truth.
A very high percentage of forum requests are not correctly answered by the direct answer somehow implied by the original request. Quite often, the question was incorrectly asked, or the OP did lock himself into a too narrow solution space even before asking the question. Trying to find the "best" way to give a perfect matching answer to the OP question tends to end up in very complex and expensive solutions that are way too complex for the OP to manage. And too many answers to such ill-asked questions tends to be using a kind of language that are more or less ordering the OP to accept the answer and continue into a nightmare scenario. "You should use ..." "The best way is ..." Helping people out on forums is very much a question about assumptions and about conditional solutions. "If your have a problem with xx you should think about yy..." "Do you mean that..." "It may be problematic to..." When people do post "continue forward" responses that are 100% agreeing with the original post but are introducing problems, they tend to get irritated if people do point at possible problems. What does the problems matter - the answer really is a continuation of the original request... And if people base their answer on a different assumption about the OP problem, they also tend to get strong responses back: "But that was not what he asked for..." But people are not built identical. People do not think identically. What is obvious to one person is not obvious to the world. Thinking "for me, the solution is obvious" is the same as making a gazillion assumtions, where the biggest of them all is that the OP did ask the correct question. Most people here knows that there are large quantities of 8051 chips with 64kB of RAM. Many here knows that there are a number of 8051 with more than 64kB of RAM. So the "obvious" follow-up on a question about the processor with the most RAM has to be a processor with way more than 64kB of RAM. And in the end, the OP hardly needs any RAM at all... In the end, we were all wrong! So, to sum this up: Unless you do know the OP and know very well his/her background and knowledge, please do help in the best way you can - by spending more effort into dragging extra information out of the OP before switching directly into solution mode. A person who have spent time here for months or years giving answers to different questions may mean exactly word-for-word what their question seems to imply. But most new, or not too regular, forum visitors do not know how to write the "perfec" question. Accept that, by helping them with the question before helping them with the solution. And don't push too hard on a single solution, since most problems have more than one acceptable solution. |