[Sprint HTC EVO 4G LTE] SilverZero:
I can see that going wrong pretty quickly, though. You can never predict who's going to ask the lazy questions vs. somebody who has a legitimate interest in testing or having trouble with their specific situation. Granting or denying access to a thread would be arbitrary and cumbersome. Or sometimes it's just an honest mistake. I have read every post of Cap's thread, the 5.5 thread, the RUU thread, the AOSP threads, basically everything dealing with the new 4.3 partition frontier, but I still got snapped at at least three times by Cap and Sin (I think) for asking what I thought were legitimate questions (among a number of other posts that were at least tolerated from me). I'm not blaming either of them or anybody else for that, but I do think it was a matter of perception about where my questions were coming from coupled with the growing stress of Cap in particular not choosing his battles as well as he probably wishes he had. You can tell his heart is in development from that alone. I think back to some other devs on other devices who would release a ROM and you'd see maybe a handful of posts from them in the rest of the thread even after a hundred pages.

I have a wife and 3 kids, I'm a teacher, I do extra work on the side almost every day, and I have several commitments outside of all of that. I'd love to know the ins and outs of decompiling a framework jar and tweaking it myself, but I don't have much time to learn all of that (or when I do, it takes a while because I'm really out of practice). I'm competent but self-trained on things like editing code and installing things in a Linux-based environment. I can learn it, but sometimes things that seem obvious to other devs are things I simply haven't learned yet.

Case in point: I was trying to replace my SystemUI.apk early on in the 4.3 stock ROM days. I couldn't get Sin's version to stick without getting repeated FC's on boot. I searched. Then I started a thread, got suggestions on checking permissions, I read up on other threads and other forums about how sometimes you have to copy it to /system then chmod it, then copy it to /app. Nothing worked. Finally, I realized I needed the sig-check-disabled services.jar in order to make this work. Now I know, and it seems obvious once I learned what that actually does. I'm sure somebody reading this will call me an idiot for not knowing that to begin with, but I simply never learned it, and Sin's post was literally "if you don't know what this is, don't use it, don't ask questions." It turns out I didn't know what it was, but I DID need it to accomplish what I wanted to do. A line in the post like "this is needed to make changes to system apps" would have saved me days of searching and frustration. Other people know what it was for, but I never learned it. Sin was well within his rights to offer the file with no explanation or guarantees, but I would suggest that that's also just begging for somebody to ask the questions you don't want to answer, maybe repeatedly. But if Sin or anybody else just wants to develop for himself and other devs, that's his choice. This will all trickle down into the next ROMs that somebody makes and bakes them into, and maybe that's the preferred path. I can't say that's right or wrong, just opinion.

Of course I realize that devs have lives outside of XDA as well, and I totally respect that. I appreciate their hard work, and I understand the frustration that comes along with it when it's taken for granted. I'm not arguing with that at all. Again, I'm a teacher. I know what it's like to explain something and then have the exact same question asked again. It happens to me every day. But when somebody is honestly trying to get their head around it for clarification, instead of just coming up after ignoring me the first time I said it, I understand that they just want to learn and are coming to me because I'm the natural person to go to. But if that lazy person came up and I just decided to stop talking to the rest of the class for the rest of the week, a lot of people doing their best would suffer for the mistakes of that one person.

I know I'm rambling, so I want to summarize: I appreciate the work of all of our devs. I understand the frustration they encounter. I also understand that XDA breeds condescension for some reason, and sometimes it brings out the worst in people who might otherwise be patient and helpful. As a person caught somewhere between clueless user and developer, I get caught in that crossfire sometimes. I'm defending myself, but I'm also defending the devs. If Cap needs a break because he was getting sucked in and feeling overwhelmed, I think that's the responsible decision. This is a forum based on modding our phones. If somebody gets to the point that their emotions are leaking into what should otherwise be objective discourse and problem solving, it's probably time to step back and gain some perspective. My opinion is that, if a question seems silly or not worth the effort to answer, just ignore it. If you know the answer, answer it, or post a link, or feel free to ignore it if you think the person should just keep searching. But if your natural response is to want to berate or belittle somebody for asking the question, then the question is probably not worth responding to in the first place. Save your energy for the good work you can do for the community. Do it because you love it. Don't feed the trolls, even the unintentional ones.