On Wed, Jul 18, 2012 at 05:31:00PM -0400, Aditi Pai wrote: > Ramit told me not to "top post," and I looked it up and I think I am doing > that same thing again, so if I am let me know how to avoid that. This kind > of discussion board is something I haven't interacted with before.
In your email program, just move the cursor (the linking line where you type) after each comment you want to reply to before answering the question. If your email program won't let you do that, either 1) use a different, better, email program (I can strongly recommend Thunderbird); or 2) apologise, but expect to still be (more, or less, gently) told off for top-posting. > Steven, thank you for trying to help me. I thought my response to Bob was > completely civil and you seem like a firey character, so I'll try to > respond as evenly as I can to you too. Like I said before, I am on a > learning curve, and the messages Emile and Ramit have sent me both had > constructive criticism as to how to proceed with asking questions as well > as awesome answers to my poorly-worded questions. The little side comments > were not included. I don't mean to "waste your time" or Bob's apparently > but asking that question led me to understand how to ask a better one. I am > trying to improve and I've just started learning. Please don't be mean. Nobody here is trying to be mean. If you think this was "firey" or mean, you should try asking questions on some of the C programming language forums. But you have to understand, this is the first time you have been in the situation of having to ask questions you don't know how to put into words. But for us, it is about the millionth time somebody has come here asking for help but not giving us enough details that we can help. Imagine that you are working at a burger restaurant, and somebody comes in and asks "I want that burger I had last month, you know, the one with the sauce that was so good", and either can't or won't tell you any more. You've got twenty different burgers on the menu and thirty different sauces, how can you possibly know which one the customer is talking about? You want to help, right, but you can't. Pretty frustrating, yeah, but you smile and do your best, because that's what you're paid for. So you ask them to describe the burger, and they say "I had it with fries and a Coke" like that helps. Now imagine how frustrating it is the tenth time somebody has done it this week, and it's only Tuesday. AND YOU'RE A VOLUNTEER. You're not being paid, you're doing it for free, to help the community, but sometimes it seems like the community is made up of demanding, needy dumb-arses who couldn't find their own nose without a team of Sherpas and a map... (No offence :) Just as we should try to remember what it was like to be in your situation, so you (and others like you) should try to imagine what it is like to be in our shoes. We're not being paid, we're doing this for free out of a desire to help others. A little bit of snarkiness is just our way of letting off steam. Forgive us the occasional grumpiness, and we'll forgive you the occasional stupid question. I'll get back to your actual programming question in a moment. -- Steven _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org To unsubscribe or change subscription options: http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
