Thread

Folks,

Nothing personal.  I love Codeigniter.  I love Ellislab.  Heck, I even love you - whoever you are.

But I have a problem. A problem with this forum.  It’s a big problem.

Every time I ask a question about Codeigniter (and I generally ask a question about once every three months, so I’m not a serial question asker) I ALWAYS end up with some * insert expletive * telling me to either go read the manual or to go and read Google.

Folks, this kind of response is both rude and misguided.  Now I know that this might come as a great shock to some of you but sometimes Google’s results either fail to answer a question satisfactorily or they do not produce any answers to specific questions at all.

I don’t understand why people here seem to love nothing more than telling people to read the manual or Google.  Does it make you feel macho or intelligent?  Some of you even have it on your signature.  Your default position in life is to go around telling people to read a manual.  You beam it out 365/24/7 with your smug little forum signatures.  Why is that?  What’s wrong with you.  ARE YOU SICK??????????!!!!

And why would anyone want to do a good deed for somebody (i.e., answer a question) and then kick them in the teeth afterwards for having the audacity to ask you a question in the first place?  If there is such a thing are karma then can’t you see that you’re just undoing any good vibes you’ve created by being a smug, self congratulatory plonker?

Now, I’ve given up hope of changing the way people behave in here.  Frankly, I think the culture of RTFM has just got completely out of hand.  There’s some great developers here but there’s also a lot of rude, flat broke, disgruntled developers.  So, it’s given me an idea…

I’m thinking about starting up a website that offers FRIENDLY technical support, help and advice for people who need it.  It’s not going to be a rival to this website.  On the contrary, I want to pay to have it advertised here.  But I’m thinking about putting together a team of Codeigniter experts and I’m going to pay them to answer legitimate questions that people post. If any of those experts automatically start telling people to read the manual/Google or whatever (without knowing what the hell they’re talking about) then I’m going to FIRE their sorry asses and do us all a favour.

So, here’s my question to you - would you like a website like that?  Is that a service that you would value?

Your post raised more than a smile…

...in defense of the “RTFM Brigade” some of the posts asking for help leave a lot to be desired. Maybe a better way to answer a question is to ask the OP what efforts they have made before posting.

This forum has an abundance of information and I usually find it is an overwhelming task to sift through all the dross to find a solution.

As far as alternative website the value then by all means give it a go. You will quickly establish the usefulness factor.

Maybe educating existing posters and give good examples on how to get useful responses would be beneficial.

Well thank you for your positive response.

I think you’re on the right track about training people.  But it’s not the posters we need to train - it’s the Forum Gestapo.

As for how to get a postive response goes, I discovered the answer to that puzzle over a year ago.  You want to know what works in here?  Let me tell you:

MONEY.

So I’m here to say let’s all stop pretending to be friends.  Let’s clarify the terms of our transactions and start communicating properly.

PS - Sorry for my spelling mistakes and typos above.  I’ve done 30 hours of Codeigniter work in two days.  I’m a bit tired and my writing isn’t quite on the ball at this time.

Hi David,

Sounds like a good project, as long as you can get the right people
to answer the question. But you need to be aware that sometimes the
first answer is not always the correct one and a lot of depends on
how this user states and defines his problem and the code they show.

InsiteFX

This seams to be a problem of all code generators, I personally use two diferent ones, this one and scriptcase I aways get the same type of answer.

Sad but true!

I think I’ve asked questions and got a “read the manual” answer before, but the answer can be helpful when showing where in the manual to read. The manual is big, so chances are that most people don’t read it like a book, but actually read parts here and there as they need answers. Also, because I tend to skim everything I read, sometimes I skimmed right over the answer and need somebody to chastise me for missing it. When somebody refers you to the manual, don’t take it personal. They may be pointing you to something you need to read or re-read. Especially if they didn’t cuss at you and call you an idiot, they were probably just trying to be helpful.

Well skunkbad you know me and I always include a link right to the User Guide source!

Well Insight, it’s a silly idea that will probably never see the light of day.  But if I had a few people of your calibre on board then I’m sure it would be a roaring success story.

Hi David C,

When I first read your post, I was thinking “Oh my… at last someone thinking the same way as I was few years ago…”! I have to admit that SOME people really look like they take a tremendous pleasure to through their RTFM at your face like treating you as an God Damned idiot, but as said also by our peers here, some of those people do that more intelligently.

However, concerning your idea to create a forum dedicated to “friendly technical support” is certainly something good… on the paper only, IMO. Why am I saying that? Well, simply because imagine the success you’ll have to spend thousands of hours replying (friendly) to the maximum number of questions to some guys (or girls) who actually do not give a @#!^$ of your friendliness and who will grab your answer and not take any single second to say ‘thanks’ to you… That’s really a pity and I have seen that so many times!

What do I suggest then? Well, may be you have felt on that site already in your past researches over the Friend-ever Google, but I found the site stackoverflow.com really well done to actually be corresponding to your desires. And thanks to their rewarding system, good posters (the friendly ones here) are rewarded by having their replies approved, accepted, +1’s etc. And bad posters (rude one who are apparently pulling you out of yours socks) quickly get negatively marked and loose their privileges to be mean.

In addition to that, I would highlight the fact that posting a proper question, that is well formed, written, with examples of code, etc. is very often replied in the next hour which made that site my favorite whenever I got stuck on CI (or any other topic actually).

If you do not know it, try it and let me know what you think about it 😉

PS: will you please excuse any english mistakes I have made here (my “Cocoricco” citizenship did not grant me a good heir on english fundamentals ;o) )

Hi,

Well there’s no doubt that people do ask silly questions from time to time.  I’ve certainly asked my share of silly questions.

With the new forum it would be a paid service.  An unashamed commercial venture.  I don’t know for sure how payment would work but if somebody wants to ask a question that’s already covered in the manual then who cares?  They’re paying for it so let them go ahead and ask what they want.

Right now I bet there are thousands of people struggling to solve simple Codeigniter problems.  But they’re not going to come here because, frankly, they don’t want a negative experience.

How many of those people would pay… say… five bucks to get a straight, accurate and friendly answer?  I know I would.

Now, if the model works for Codeigniter surely it could work for Zend or Cake or indeed any of the major frameworks.

I’m really beginning to think that this could be worth a shot.

So, you want to create another http://www.experts-exchange.com?  There are several of these pay for help sites that have existed for a long time (and are quite good).  How would yours be different and better?

Good question.  The answer is I’d narrow the focus.

Which site would you go to for Zend help:

http://www.expertsexchange.com  or www.zendhelpdesk.com?

Personally, neither…I’d just google my problem like I do for everything, for free, and I have always found the answer in about 10 seconds.  It’s all in the phrasing of the question.  If you don’t find the answer on the first page of results you probably didn’t phrase the question correctly.  People are rude due to the anonymity the net gives them, yes, but it’s not difficult to ignore.

Personally, neither…I’d just google my problem like I do for everything, for free, and I have always found the answer in about 10 seconds.  It’s all in the phrasing of the question.  If you don’t find the answer on the first page of results you probably didn’t phrase the question correctly.  People are rude, yes, but it’s not difficult to ignore.

I have to agree. CroNiX & myself definitely aren’t your target audience as neither of us would use it. However, if you’re able to turn your forum frustration into a profitable business venture, more power to ya! Do your due diligence, figure out how to promote it, make sure there are even enough people willing to pay for answers or you won’t keep the interest of your team answering questions & they’ll leave and the whole thing will go down the toilet. And I’m sure you’ll have to fund it initially yourself just to get people through the door.

Experts Exchange has been around for a good while now, I’m sure it’s at least worth looking into if that’s something you think you could make sustainable.

Hi folks,

Am new to the boards ( have just completed a fairly simple CI project, didn’t post any questions has I had some PHP experience before and the project wasn’t a biggie ).

My main background is coding Lingo in Director / Shockwave 3D, but now we’re getting more into back-end coding for server based projects - CI seems like the perfect solution for a simple, easy to understand ( if you have used MVC design before in other projects ) PHP project.

I can see why the more experienced developers might get annoyed at newbies posting simple / RTFM questions.

A possible solution would be to have a newbie forum section.  If people post in here, they are either newbies, or experienced developers who want to help out newbies.  For pro non-newbie-friendly developers, they can just ignore that section.  Think of it like a newbie filter 😊

Looking forward to being part of the community.
Mal

PS are there any other Irish / Northern Ireland CI developers on the forum?