From: ARNE@KOPC.HHS.DK (Arne Vajhxj)
Newsgroups: comp.os.vms
Subject: Re: Butthead
Date: 28 Dec 92 08:39:51 GMT
Distribution: world
Organization: The Internet


To all the people who likes to flame others for posting  poorly described
questions which can easily be answered via TFM or HELP:

  - Noone is born with VMS knowledge, we all have to learn it. We
    quote (probably bad translation, but... ): It is human to
    make mistakes but divine to forgive !

  - TFM and HELP is very usefull, when you have learned your way through
    them, but if you have not and you also have misunderstood the reason
    behind your problem (which is very often the case for problems!), then
    it is difficult to get on the rigth track.

Another way of looking at the problem: who benefits from flames ?
The "victim" gets angry and chooses either to ignore them or never
post to INFO-VAX again! The readers which did not know the answer
finds the flamer an arrogant ........! The readers which did know the
answer finds the flame boring to read! The flamer may think he
feels better, but actually he just get more frustrated!

So when someone ask a polite question (and most of the posters do
ask rather polite and admit openly, that they are a beginner), then
give them a polite answer (and maybe some hints about how they can
solve their next problem themselves!).

Reserve the flames for people answering questions incomplete and/or
incorrectly !

To all the people who have a question, that they want to post:

Carl Lydicks points about how to post a question are not so bad !

Besides lowering the blood-preasure for certain individuals then YOU
WILL GET MORE AND BETTER ANSWERS if your posting includes:

  - a detailed description of the problem
  - software names and versions
  - exact error-messages and/or log-files
  - a valid email-address

The first 3 is rather obvious - to give a good answer you need to know the
facts. With f.ex. programming problems then post the smallest possible
code-fragment, that can be ran independently and will show the problem.

A valid email-address allows an answer to be send directly to you. It is
quite common to post answers both to the list and directly to the original
poster. But sometimes you want only to send the answer to the original poster
(if you consider the problem to be of no general interest). An the from-field
is very often useless.

At last a few general comments:

  - Do not pick at peoples language. A lot of people do not have english
    as their language of birth. My english may not be perfect, but it is
    probably better than your danish :-)

  - The argument "he has never posted some answers to this list, so he
    should keep his mouth shot" is not valid. You do not get a rigth to
    decide what is good behaviour on INFO-VAX just because the have a
    large VMS knowledge and are friendly enough to sepnd some time sharing
    it with other.

  - Wheter a poster of a question has subscribed to the list or not is
    rather irrelevant. He would benefit from it, but if he decide against
    it, then it is his decision. There may be several reasons for such
    a decision (ordinary laziness, communication expenses, lack of time etc.).
    His problem not ours !

                                                                   Arne

Arne Vajhxj                             local DECNET:  KO::ARNE
Computer Department                     PSI:           PSI%23831001304030::ARNE
Business School of Southern Denmark     Internet:      ARNE@KO.HHS.DK