Sometimes I don’t know why I bother helping on forums because there are a number of ungrateful little pieces of extrament that really irritate the heck out of me. In the last 24 hours on Code Project the following has been posted.
mehnazash wrote:
please help…processes in remote server.. minhpc_bk, u dint help me completely, please do
But that was after waiting three and a half hours for a reply. The poor guy, “minhpc_bk”, might be asleep, shopping, visiting family, any number of other things that mean he has not yet seen the response.
So my message to those that want help RIGHT NOW and try a guilt trip as a means of getting support:
If your problem is really that urgent that you are trying to embarrass those that try to help you in to giving you more assistance as a priority then I suggest that you you might like to try Microsoft Support. They will be glad to hand-hold you right through your problem for a small fee. The people here give up their time for free in order to help their peers. A little more appreciation of their dedication to helping solve other people’s problems would be nice. Remember that they don’t have to help you, and if they didn’t you wouldn’t get anywhere at all.
And then ballameharmurali tried this attempt at inducing a guilt trip just half an hour later:
hello guffa,
i have seen u giving suggestions lots of times. It is better if u give code rather than suggestions.
ok. Plz Dont do like that.
The message is pretty clear. Luckily Guffa has a fantastic sense of humour and responded like this:
if (question.Topic == QuestionTopics.Code)
{
Reply.Write(knowledge.DoCorrections(question.Code));
}
else
{
Reply.Write(knowledge.FindSuggestion(question.Problem));
}However, this proverb is pretty apt too:
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
Which can be re-written as:
Give a man some code and you solve his problem today. Teach a man to code and you solve his problems for a lifetime.
By giving suggestions and links to documentation Guffa is teaching people how to think. If he just straight gave the code then people would just copy and paste the code and never really understand how it works. So what happens is that they come back and ask for more and more code. I’ve seen it several times when I answer the same person over and over with pretty much the same question with a minor modification. If they would just read the documentation and articles rather than just copy the code given in an answer they wouldn’t need to keep asking pretty much the same question over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and ove and over and over and over… Well… you get the idea.
Anyway, going back to the title of my post. Why do I do it? I have no idea really. It gives me a warm fuzzy feeling to help people. I do get the occasional thank you. But sometime I really do have to leave the forums for a couple of days because of some idiot who thinks the world ows him a favour.
