> or will all you advanced guys/girls spend countless hours repeatedly > asking people to post code, use print_r()/var_dump() etc... without so > much as > halfbaked challenge in sight? Yes. :-) Perhaps I should explain why. Once upon a time, a long time ago, I was new to PHP. And I was a good little netizen and read the FAQ. Not claiming I comprehended it all, mind you, but I read it. :-) After, oh, a half-year or year of PHP (with a good decade of other languages preceding PHP) I figured I had it licked, and want to do something general for a form-mail script where I didn't know what all the POST vars were in advance. I posted my question. Some dude named Rasmus Lerdorf was kind enough to answer, succinctly and clearly, without rancor or chiding: http://us3.php.net/manual/en/faq.using.php#faq.using.anyform [Only I believe is was FAQ # 1.4 back then. :-)] I had not even comprehended that question when I had first read the FAQ six months earlier, much less the answer to the question. Hell, I barely understood the FAQ then, but knew how to loop through an array, and sure enough, there was the stuff I wanted. Onward! More time went on. I learned a TON OF [BLEEP] from these guys that kept posting, particularly these dudes named Rasmus Lerdorf, Andi Gutmans, and Zeev Suraski and ... One day, for some reason, I looked at the credits of PHP and figured something out: All these dudes answering my questions and other people's even more silly questions, were the same dudes that, instead of answering silly questions, could be FIXING PHP and adding more functions and adding more modules and... I had a wish-list of stuff I wanted in PHP. Now, I know my limitations. I doubt that I'll ever find time to change PHP source code to put in my wish-list. But if I can save Rasmus and those guys an hour a day answering silly newbie questions, it seems the least I can do to help out, so maybe they'll have time to implement stuff from my wish-list instead of answering silly questions. Maybe I'll be here awhile, maybe I'll be gone awhile (it's happened) but I'm honored to do my fair share to help out when I can. YMMV That's not to say I don't think people should just post away without reading the FAQ, and doing a Google and whatnot. Frequently, my answer consists of little more than a link to the docs they need to read. Maybe they should have found them. Maybe they searched, but didn't know what the heck it was called that they were searching for. Maybe they just forgot to re-read the FAQ after a year of using PHP. :-) I generally figure if they are asking, they probably *DID* put out some effort. If it's 100% obvious they didn't even try, a link to the manual is all they get. If they tried, but just plain don't "get" it -- or if it's POSSIBLE that's where they are, it's easier to give them the benefit of the doubt and just explain the docs in English a bit more in depth than to go back-and-forth with them over several emails to find out why they are confused. I've certainly seen a few trigger-happy posts of RTFM and Yes here, when, in fact, the user was trying to ask/address a much deeper and more complex issue than was apparent on first reading their post. Some have even turned into discussions where I ended up learning something. You take the good with the bad. [shrug] That's all just my take on it. Sometimes it works out well. Sometimes not. I'm reminded of a time I answered some guy's problem about Oracle not connecting and I said: SetEnv('ORACLEHOME', '/path/to/your/oracle/home'); SetEnv('ORACLESID', 'your oracle SID'); -- which I had *NO* idea what any of that meant, as I'd never used Oracle at the time, and didn't know what SetEnv did, really, but I knew it was the same damn answer Rasmus/Thies/Whomever had been giving every damn week for the six months I was on the list... A parrot could have answered that one. Anyway, next thing I know, some guy is bitching at me for not helping him out with his other Oracle problems after that, claiming I was just being mean and knew the answer but wouldn't help him... [shrug] Takes all types. I just emailed him back and told the truth. "Never used Oracle. Just repeated the info like a parrot that matched your problem before. No idea what's going on with you current problem." and that was that. I think he got it sorted out eventually, and life went on. As I recall, the last time I thought of trying to "fix" the mailing list newbie problem, I was gonna build an "AI" system to "read" their email, match up keywords with the FAQ, and compose a completely automatic email response if anything matched up. :-) Okay, maybe to a search on php.net as well, and post a link to that. I still might do that, I guess, if I find the time... Haven't found the time in a decade of PHP programming, but anything's possible. Now, perhaps, an INTERESTING project for some of us to work on would be that system: Spec: Robot subscriber to PHP-General. Reads all incoming messages. Discards anything that looks like a 'Reply:' including: Has 'Re: ' or 'Fwd: " in subject Has Message ID in-reply-to header thingies Concats Subject and body, with signatures removed. Removes all common English words Searches for remaining [key]words in php.net/faq.php If any matches, deep-link (with #xyz) to the FAQ answers. If number of remaining [key]words (above) is small, also compose a URL link to http://php.net/remaining+keywords Creates a reply email (to original poster only) suggesting that maybe they just need to check those links, but to REPLY to their post if they're STILL lost after reading all that stuff. That way, if any of us see a question that we KNOW is answered in FAQ or php.net/xyz and that is not a Reply of some kind, we can let the robot handle it. What do you think? Worth doing? Waste of time? You interested in implementing or testing it? Got a server where you control smrsh and whatnot enough to handle it? I don't think my cable-modem provider would like it if I did this at home, and my shared server host ain't gonna let me add a smrsh file or muck with his mail server -- Hell, he don't even run email through the same machine I have my website on anyway... So I'm not gonna sit down and write the code if I know in advance I can't run it on any hardware that will be feasible in the end. -- Like Music? http://l-i-e.com/artists.htm -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
