[asterisk-users] FW: hi Dan

[Joe Greco]

> What say you to the proposal that some approaches to seeking help are  
> so ridiculous they should not be tolerated?
> 
> Community standards neither conceive nor enforce themselves.

This community standard is entirely self-enforcing.

If everybody thinks the request for help is unwarranted and doesn't
deserve an answer, then nobody answers.

If it isn't so intolerable to fall victim to that, then someone may
feel inclined to help out and answer.

If the volume of such requests becomes sufficiently burdensome that
it exhausts those answering the questions, then eventually the
equilibrium resets; those answering the questions begin to pick out
the ones that they feel are worthy of answers.

Years ago, I got a bit of a panicky phone call from a sysadmin at an
ISP that I was loosely familiar with from mailing lists.  He was rather
frazzled and puzzled because he had been struggling to solve a problem
during a downtime; it was something I was familiar with and had been
advocating on a mailing list.  He was doing something completely
reasonable-seeming, it's just that what he was doing didn't work, and
had never worked that way.  I walked him through a different method,
from memory, solved his problem.  I'm positive I could have charged
him billable hours, but I didn't, because I felt somewhat responsible
for having advocated something rather complex that was followed by a 
competent admin and it blew up in his face - precisely *because* the
problem and fix were obscure.

The Asterisk community is great at promoting itself, but quite frankly
the documentation and solutions are sometimes not all that great.  It
can be challenging to find the right fix, or even *a* fix.  Questions
*must* be expected.  The community has generally been fairly successful
at coping with the questions; I view the beginning of this thread to be
a sign of that.

... JG
-- 
Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
"We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I
won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN)
With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.