This keeps coming up and going round and round. Having been on the internet for quite a few years myself I have an opinion or perhaps just an observation.
There is an acronym RTFM (Reade The 'Fine' Manual) that seems to have popularity in circles or programmers when people ask very simple or what they consider stupid questions. I have seen it mutated into RTFF (Read The 'Fine' FAQ) in many newsgroups. It becomes the standard or stock answer in place of repeatedly answering the same quesiton over and over again, not to mention creating threads of conversations discussing the issue over and over ad nausium.
Many times these FAQ's were posted to those newsgroups monthly or with some regularity. The main reason was a little thign called bandwidth which was being protected by many. I can still remember getting flamed for having a signature that was 5 lines long instead of 4. Many pieces of the network had to download every piece of information then upload all the changes that occured on it each night or more often. So bandwidth became this ever-so-critical commodity that people tended to try and protect. Customs of shorter signature blocks, not over quoting posts in reponses, me-too's and other such things developed and FAQ's came out of this as well.
Now that we have entered the WEB,AOL and SPAM age, bandwidth as a commodity seems to no longer exist or at least people are less and less aware of it.
In our case here, we have a FAQ though I don't notice it getting posted to the newsgroup monthly as is the custom of others. So a newbie may come here and lurk for quite some time without seeing the FAQ. Expecially, if he does not know to go to the FAQ's group or what have you.
Perhaps for the sake of civility and in the spirit of preservation of bandwidth we could simply refer FAQ related questions to the FAQ without judgement and such. As well we could avoid long threads of nothing but discussing why we refused to give an answer and so on and so forth.
Something like:
"That is something covered in this newsgroup's FAQ. The FAQ has been painstakingly assembled by the kind volunteers who maintain it. Please read the FAQ before posting questions to the group to make sure your question hasn't already been answered.. The FAQ is located at
formatting link
"
Like everything else this is just my opinion, but I felt it needed to be said. I remember back in '91 when it seemed like every other post was a request for a Master Lock Combination. Point is, the whole atmosphere of reading the newsgroup. As reasoned and insiteful as anti-trolling messages and refusals of secure information requests are, they become tiresome. And some of us still have to download the whole mess wheter or not we decide to delete it or not. Just a thought.
all flames > dev/null
-- Absinthe