Re: instruction for submitting help requests

[Steven Levine]

In <address@hidden>, on 07/15/06
   at 10:33 AM, Shai Ayal <address@hidden> said:

>Maybe we should make it a bit harder to submit to help & bug?

I would not recommend this.  One needs to keep in mind that the current
computer user may have domain knowledge, but not necessarily computer
knowledge.  This is understandable given that for the vast majority of
today's computer users, computers are basically commodity appliances.  At
one time this was more of less limited to Windows and Mac users.  However
with the Linux distros maturing, I see it more and more with Linux users.

I prefer to believe that the posters don't realize how important the
omitted information is.

My approach to the problem is to have a canned response that requests the
missing information.  I don't try to guesses as to the problem solution
and I don't bother to tell them directly that they did something wrong. 
This gently educates the poster without rewarding them for their
inadvertent bad behavior.  It only takes a couple of seconds to post the
canned response.  If that feels like more effort than I'm willing to
expend, I just hit delete.

Regards,

Steven

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"Steven Levine" <address@hidden>  MR2/ICE 2.67 #10183 Warp/eCS/DIY/14.103a_W4
www.scoug.com irc.fyrelizard.com #scoug (Wed 7pm PST)
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