Serial posters who waste our time

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daninz
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Serial posters who waste our time

Post by daninz »

Hello everyone,
It’s been a few years now since I adopted wxWidgets to do multiplatform GUI development. However, since GUI development is not the most important part of my dev activities, I am not an expert. Whenever I run into a problem I try my best to solve it myself, so that I learn in the process. So far I have got into two problems that I could not figure out, and I posted two questions, in the believe that if I couldn’t find an answer after trying, the questions would be of general interest.
The two times, I got an answer from someone calling himself doublemax, who is now a moderator. And the two times his answers were totally useless, revealing that he knew nothing about the subject (in my opinion).
Here are the two topics:
viewtopic.php?t=39164
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=43641&p=178299#p178299
Now, here is my question / proposition.
Question: is my experience unique, or is this forum full of people like doublemax who are in a quest to accumulate points, disregarding of the actual value they bring to the community?
If this is really a problem, can we do something about it?
In terms of finding a solution, I’m thinking along the lines of allowing the poster of a question to mark answers as ‘useful’ if he so chooses, and only showing the number of ‘useful’ marks a poster has got. So, doublemax could boast today of two fewer posts, as I would never have marked his two answers as useful.
If this is felt as a real problem in need of a solution, lets discuss.
Thanks.
PB
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Re: Serial posters who waste our time

Post by PB »

daninz wrote:Serial posters who waste our time.
Just out of curiousity: As you wrote "our", could you please tell me who is that "we" you represent here? Have you discussed this issue with other users and were delegated to speak in their name? How many did you address and how many of them did you agree with you on doublemax (and others) "wasting their time"?
daninz wrote:Question: is my experience unique, or is this forum full of people like doublemax who are in a quest to accumulate points, disregarding of the actual value they bring to the community? .... So, doublemax could boast today of two fewer posts, as I would never have marked his two answers as useful.
What are those points you are talking about, do you mean forum posts? Have you actually seen doublemax or someone else to boast about the number of posts they get?
Supposing the community is this forum. What do you believe are your benefits you have brought to this community?
coderrc
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Re: Serial posters who waste our time

Post by coderrc »

It has been a rough year for me financially, but doublemax has been so helpful and saved me so much time that I am setting aside a few dollars every month in order to compensate him for all the time he has taken out of his life to help me and so many others.

I really cant express how glad I am that he has been here since I joined the forums, so I have no idea what you're on about.
DavidHart
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Re: Serial posters who waste our time

Post by DavidHart »

Two points, about accuracy and attitude.
daninz wrote:he knew nothing about the subject
How sure are you about your facts? For example, how many of doublemax's posts did you assess for their usefulness?

If you look, or look harder, I think you will find that over the years doublemax has helped an enormous number of people. You joined the forum four years ago; how many members have you helped in that time?
This is the kind of stupid answer I was dreading to get.
Quite apart from what that sort of comment says about your personality, what effect do you think it has on the likelihood of people helping you in the future?
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doublemax
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Re: Serial posters who waste our time

Post by doublemax »

Thanks for all supporting me. I didn't want to feed the troll, so i didn't bother to answer.
coderrc wrote:It has been a rough year for me financially, but doublemax has been so helpful and saved me so much time that I am setting aside a few dollars every month in order to compensate him for all the time he has taken out of his life to help me and so many others.
I just wanted to say that i didn't take any compensation from coderrc (or anyone else) and i'm not going to in the future :)
Use the source, Luke!
iwbnwif
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Re: Serial posters who waste our time

Post by iwbnwif »

I would also like to thank doublemax for his untiring patience and support on these forums.

Why anyone would seek to criticise someone who is trying to help them is beyond me.
wxWidgets 3.1.2, MinGW64 8.1.0, g++ 8.1.0, Ubuntu 19.04, Windows 10, CodeLite + wxCrafter
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marcelinux
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Re: Serial posters who waste our time

Post by marcelinux »

iwbnwif wrote:I would also like to thank doublemax for his untiring patience and support on these forums.
+1 =D>
I just need learn a little bit more. Thank you for your help.
coderrc
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Re: Serial posters who waste our time

Post by coderrc »

doublemax wrote:Thanks for all supporting me. I didn't want to feed the troll, so i didn't bother to answer.
coderrc wrote:It has been a rough year for me financially, but doublemax has been so helpful and saved me so much time that I am setting aside a few dollars every month in order to compensate him for all the time he has taken out of his life to help me and so many others.
I just wanted to say that i didn't take any compensation from coderrc
Yes, sorry. It seems every month the last 6 months I get hit with 2-3000usd of unexpected bills #-o lol one day though, hopefully. You've legit saved me so much hassle and heartache.
daninz
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Re: Serial posters who waste our time

Post by daninz »

After more than 11000 posts I would expect that this person has helped some, and maybe many people, since many people ask for help at the first difficulty, but my experience is that the two times I submitted a question this person was there immediately putting the spoon in the soup, giving some totally useless answer, a time waster.

My first ever question (viewtopic.php?t=39164) was about wxStyledTextCtrl. Not many people use that control. I did at the time because I was involved in writing a compiler and needed to display coloured syntax on a text editor. From my question anyone could tell that I was not just a beginner trying to get started with the control. doublemax, who knew nothing about it (after all, when and why would he have used it?) felt the urge to ‘help’ me. He looked at the wxStyledTextCtrl Class Reference, read that it is a wrapper for Scintilla, found, from the same doc, the scintilla web site, and sent me to the scintilla documentation, saying that what I was looking for was
Probably somewhere in the Scintilla documentation:
http://www.scintilla.org/ScintillaDoc.html

FWIW: I've never used this control myself because of its horrible documentation.
Thank you for your help, dude!

But what were you thinking? That I use the scintilla wrapper and never read the scintilla documentation? I didn’t even know where it was? You have the audacity to telling me that the info I need is “probably” there? And that you never used the control yourself because of its horrible documentation? (No, it is not horrible, it is very good!)

Not only you wasted my time, thanks to your moronic answer my question was no longer UNANSWERED, and so the possibility of attracting the attention of someone who could answer seriously was actually decreased, thanks to your help.

For my second ever question (viewtopic.php?f=1&t=43641), the image there speaks for itself.

As I said: after more than 11000 posts I would expect that this character has helped some, and maybe many people, since many people ask for help at the first difficulty. If he had stick to what he knows, commendable! But in his quest to accumulate posts, how many 100's or 1000’s of times has he helped other people the same way he (or her) ‘helped’ me, possibly depriving them of the possibility of getting real help?

So, my question to the forum is valid: have other people suffered from being ‘helped’ this way by any user, and what can we do about it?
PB
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Re: Serial posters who waste our time

Post by PB »

daninz wrote:So, my question to the forum is valid: have other people suffered from being ‘helped’ this way by any user, and what can we do about it?
Did you actually read the posts in this thread - still not enough.

You also conveniently ignored all the questions (e.g., how many people is the "we" you believe you represent, what value have you brought here, why the so out-of-place toxic attitude) I so politely asked you in my previous post in this thread.

I guess that in your mind, every poster in this thread except yourself is doublemax posting under different nick names, hoarding "the points"...
iwbnwif
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Re: Serial posters who waste our time

Post by iwbnwif »

So, my question to the forum is valid: have other people suffered from being ‘helped’ this way by any user, and what can we do about it?
Some suggestions regarding your second question:

1. For a completely free, friendly response to your question that may be advice, suggestions, anecdotes or just conversation, then use this "wxWidgets Discussion Forum". BTW every thread can be marked as [Solved] by the originator - I doubt that just having the number of replies > 0 reduces the chance of you receiving a further answer.

2. For a platform where answers can scored (up and down) - potentially encouraging a higher standard of questions and answers, then use Stack Overflow or Experts Exchange.

3. For professional, paid-for support - where an acceptable service level can be reasonably expected, then go to an appropriate provider, such as TT Solutions.
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daninz
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Re: Serial posters who waste our time

Post by daninz »

iwbnwif : thank you for your three suggestions.

Regarding your 1: in Quick links there is an “Unread posts” and an “Unanswered posts”; certainly the reason for those categories is to attract attention to the topics they contain, so that no question goes unread or unanswered.

Regarding 2: on Stack Overflow anybody can score up or down any answer, sometimes (but not often) leading to “why did you score me down!” bickering.

Given that, on this forum, the number of Posts contributed by every user is shown as a way of measuring his or her credibility (what other reason could there be?), my suggestion is that, to encourage a higher standard of answers, two changes be made:

1) the thread originator, and no one else, can mark any answer, and more than one answer, as ‘helpful’.
2) the information associated with each user contains, as now, the number of posts, and additionally the number of ‘helpful’ posts.

That should not discourage people to post any “advice, suggestions, anecdotes or just conversation”, quoting you.
MagickPanda
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Re: Serial posters who waste our time

Post by MagickPanda »

doublemax is always helpful and his solution works for me.
dunno the intention of this topi, you can always ignore the answer if you think it's not a working solution, posting a topic to whine about someone being helpful is not nice, at best.
koekhaos
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Re: Serial posters who waste our time

Post by koekhaos »

I've asked questions that he wasn't able to fully answer as well, but unlike you I found what he could provide to be helpful and could see he was trying. It isn't like he is paid to provide tech support. He's a volunteer who, almost solely it seems, tries to help everyone where he can. Would you prefer to not receive any attempts at help instead? Like others said, if you want solid support with techs dedicated to the product you might want to look at another product such as QT where I believe you can get paid for support. Otherwise there really isn't much to complain about when someone is at least trying to be helpful as nothing more than a volunteer, even if it doesn't end up helping you! I for one hope he continues to do what he does!
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