Hey, happy Tuesday, how's everybody doing? I just wanted to take a moment out of my afternoon to remind everyone about the awesome search technology this mailing list is built on. It's called Google, and it can help you quickly and efficiently find answers to questions that you might have.
Normally I wouldn't take the time to point this out, as it is usually fairly self-evident (refer to the logo in the upper left-hand corner of your screen), but lately the CakePHP community has been experiencing some growing pains. (Not to say that growth is bad, by all means, keep it going). We've had people joining the community at all levels of PHP and programming experience, which is great. What's not great is that people are continuing to ask questions without bothering to search for an answer beforehand. CakePHP is over a year old, and this mailing list is quickly approaching 3000 users. What that means for you is that almost any question you could ever want to ask in your first 3 months of using Cake (or ever) has already been asked, and answered.... many, many, many times. Not only that, but people are also asking questions that are blatantly off-topic, or are general PHP questions that have nothing specific to do with Cake. While this isn't a terrible thing to do, strictly speaking, it certainly doesn't help. (Hint: if you click on the "About" link and scroll to the bottom of the page, there are at least two general PHP mailing lists linked, where you can ask all the PHP questions you want). So, why is this bad? For one thing, I simply can't understand the level of patience required to do something like that. The latest versions of all three major browers have search boxes built right in, which means quick access to information is literally seconds away, whereas asking questions on a mailing list requires you to wait for minutes, hours, or in some cases, days. I don't know about you, but I simply don't have that kind of time. Furthermore, it makes it more difficult for myself and others like me (sdevore, AD7six, psychic, jzimmerman, and more [you know who you are]) who answer your questions on our own time and at our own expense. This is Open Source, no one gets paid to answer questions. These people do it because they care about the advancement of this project. As a core developer, I feel a certain amount of responsibility to them, and if you can't meet them halfway by taking a little bit of effort to answer your own questions, rather than relying on others to spoon-feed you information, that is nothing short of disrespect. Also, and this is probably the single most important point: asking redundant questions dilutes the pool of relevant information for those that come after you. When the same question is asked 20 different times in 20 different ways, it makes it harder to wade through search results when trying to find an answer to your question, which, of course, is the *entire point*. And for those of you who were wondering, the answer is yes: I am keenly aware that the title of this post contains a double negative. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Cake PHP" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/cake-php -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
