OT: TO NEWBIES: why do people don�t use the archive first ?

[Paul Derbyshire]

At 11:29 PM 2/4/00 +0100, you wrote:
>this is just a hint message:
>besides the incredibly often occuring `remove` messages,
>there are so many mails with the same questions every single day,
>am I the only one that takes a look in the archive before starting to pos=
>t to a mailinglist?

Probably. Most people don't have the time to surf an archive site. Besides,
you can search through archives vgrepping them for weeks and not either
read everything or run into a duplicate of the question you're asking --
and still turn out to be asking a question already asked by someone else.

This is why those documents, called FAQs, that answer all the most
frequently asked questions and are organized in some logical way, rather
than simply by the date and time the question happened to be asked, are
written for newsgroups and mailing lists with frequently asked questions
and either no archives or very large archives. Maybe the occurrence of lots
of repeat questions here is a hint that providing a FAQ would be a good
idea :-)


-- 
   .*.  "Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not
-()  <  circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a
   `*'  straight line."    -------------------------------------------------
        -- B. Mandelbrot  |http://surf.to/pgd.net derbyshire at globalserve.net
_____________________ ____|________                          Paul Derbyshire
Programmer & Humanist|ICQ: 10423848|