quote:Original post by Anonymous Poster
nobody forced you to reply to this thread.
why don''t you label your posts with a name? are you afraid of something?
this "don''t reply" attitude, taken heartily by many easily offended gamedev members, has the unfortunate side-effect of forcing the more knowledgeable population to leave or become less active. how, you ask?
the two components of a forum are people asking and people answering questions. most people come to a forum with a question, and start by playing the first role. many stay around hoping to help someone in the future with their question, if they can, just like someone else helped them earlier. without this second component, the forum isn''t much useful.
now, consider people answering questions. obviously, some know more and others know less. an easily observed tendency is that people who know more tend to have higher questions answered to questions asked ratio, and moreover, that they are generally more often correct. such people have an interest in helping other people learn something, troubleshoot their problems, and so on. instead of posting wild guesses, they would research information for the benefit of a single poster.
said knowledgeable people often see misleading and incorrect replies posted by people without much clue. often posters would pull authoritative claims out of thin air, knowing next to nothing about subject at hand. should wrong responses be corrected? as someone who is interested in helping others become better programmers, i say yes. others, whose worst nightmare is have their error pointed out to them, say no. they prefer to live in ignorance, and that''s fine by me; but when they take their ignorance out to other people, they become a pain. i spend time here to help people be better programmers, and these people do the opposite by posting incorrect information.
similarly, there are people who ask questions in the form close to "i copied this program from a web page/book cd/elsewhere, (optionally changed something,) and it doesn''t work. somebody fix it for me." while it''s obvious that providing such fix benefits the poster in the short run, in the long run nothing is achieved. thus the poster is told how to find a solution himself, with the hope that he will be able to solve similar problems in future himself, without asking others for help.
back to "don''t reply." should i give up on threads which contain false or misleading posts because someone might be offended by me correcting them? should i ignore beginners and let other beginners, who were more successful in pasting the code, paste their code into posts here and help the original poster with his pasting? would you like to receive incorrect facts as replies to your posts, that are not corrected by members who know for sure the falsehood of those facts, but are afraid of hurting someone''s ego?
receiving knowledgeable answers is a privilege, not a right. people who respond do so because they have some interest in that. killing this interest will leave you with a board of lower S:N ratio on the answer side, which means that when you have a question, you''ll get lower quality responses or no responses at all. do you really desire it?
