Re: [cobalt-users] WAP / Archive Searching [was Anybody experienced problems with All Security 3.0.1-6682?]

[Steven Werby <steven-lists@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 31 Aug 2000, Zeffie wrote:

> My point steve is that your habit of telling someone to search the archives
> is a waste of bandwidth?

I only recommend on-list to search the archives when it's a
question that's been answered repeatedly and is easy to find with an
archive search.  And I do so to remind the poster and the hundreds of
users of this list that the archive is a useful tool and IMO should be the
first tool used.  And I generally only post a response to search the
archives when the user has *repeatedly* demonstrated that they do not
search the archives.

> in this letter you say "Mark's question can be found a couple of times
> within the first 10 results on a search for "wap""  and I know you did this
> so why didn't you do it then and post your results?

If I had done the search myself at that point I would have.  I bet I've
posted the URL of a previous post 10 times in the last month on-list in
response to users' questions. In this case I didn't do the archive search
until *after* I read your post and I only did it to prove my point.  FYI,
I believe the answer to Mark's question was in the 3rd item on a search
for "wap" at the time of his question.

> read.  I read every post and it gets a little irritating to see people not
> get any answers but go search comments.  If you don't want to answer the
> question then don't!  Let someone else deal with them.

I already do that.  And while seeing search-related posts irritates you,
seeing people post questions with answers that can easily be found in the
archives and in some cases seeing the same people do this over and over
irritates me.  And based on the number of people who have shared the same
sentiments as me on and off list over the years I know I'm not alone.  In
fact, some very knowlegable and friendly people have left this forum since
I joined it and some of them did so because of this and other problems
that have been discussed in the past.

>     In my last post I stated that you had 3 "go search" posts in 23 letters.
> I have 808 letters to go.  Does that mean that over 100 of them will be you
> saying go search?

Yes, that's exactly what that means.

> BTW Steve I was at a friends place and he was complaing about his frontpage
> not working.  I tried to search the archives and slowly via 56k modem I
> found nothing helpful, and nothing that could be found within a short
> period.

Obviously the archives won't have answers to every question, but most
questions have answers in the archives that can be found in a few minutes.

> The results of these posts need to get to the real knowlegebase at
> cobalt.

And the cobaltzone.com project I started last month with a number of
others (including you).

--
Steven Werby {steven-lists@xxxxxxxxxxxx}