Re: List intolerance VS advocacy

[Marc Matteo <marcm@lectroid.net>]

On Thu, 2002-06-13 at 04:14, Scott Sandeman-Allen (RSCorp) wrote:

> It is detrimental to everyone if we discourage people from asking questions and
> when we offend users of any experience level. Think of it this way, in a
> hypothetical example: 
> 
>     John B. or Jane Q. Newbie is looking for an alternative OS 
>     for personal use. They find out about a cool project called 
>     OpenBSD and investigate it. Then, months later, they are in 
>     a board meeting when it is discussed that their server got 
>     hacked or some other IT related problem where OBSD would fit.
> 
> How do they respond in this situation? 

They hire experienced admins to maintain it, because if they don't,
running OpenBSD or not their newbie asses will get 0wn3d again and
again.

While admittedly OpenBSD lists can be sometimes overly tough on newbies,
I think there's a desire among the more experienced to make sure the
inexperienced learn basic *NIX survival skills (like man pages, FAQs and
archive searches).

Go take a look at a few days of the Gentoo-Linux mailing lists.  Now
they may have gotten a handle on things since I ran away screaming but
when I looked in there were 100-300 messages a day with the vast
majority being basic "how do I..." questions asked by people who
apparently can't read files named "README".

Marc