Let me make a suggestion that I have seen work well elsewhere. Often, the problem with powerful open-source software is that the documentation is opaque to newcomers. That's because it's often written by the same people who designed and wrote the code. Things which seem glaringly obvious once you're an insider can be infuriatingly difficult just to locate at first. This isn't a matter of stupidity or laziness on anyone's part, it's just the way things are and are likely to remain.
An RTFM response with a page or section number is often all that is needed. RTFMs *without* a page or section number don't belong on Usenet or a public mailing list, they just demonstrate the narrowness of vision of those who send them. There are always some people who expect the world to do all their work for them, but mostly we see people trying to wrestle with the unfamiliar, and the tradition of help kindly phrased - which so often is seen on the part of those who have deep expertise and long experience - is something we should foster. No-one *has* to reply to a cry for help: many newcomers clearly signal that that's who they are. There is astonishing willingness on the part of some people to offer their help. A convention of clearly signalling that you need a pointer to something likely to be in TFM could help a lot. Also, remember that many people whose English is not super-fluent have to make serious efforts to communicate at all in the first place, and can have difficulty with certain idiomatic and colloquial usages in TFM. Words like barf, munge and so forth are local to the USA; more technical usages can be local to the particular kind of software involved. Try reading French computer documentation using only school French and you'll get some sense of the problem. _______________________________________________ VNC-List mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.realvnc.com/mailman/listinfo/vnc-list
