Question about reviving a decade old topic

[Piergiorgio_d_errico]

Personally, I consider myself CG… (that is bending, the rules for common good…)

on necro’ing… It’s only me or is a thing whose can be interesting into the ectoComp ?

Best regards from Italy,
dott.Piergiorgio

[patrick_mooney]

@HanonO

Sometimes necro-ing is appropriate. We try not to harass people for “asking the same question” but … … tidiness.

I think there’s also a lot to be said for a general expectation of “show you’ve tried to find the answer yourself before you ask people to do the work of explaining something to you.”

Yes, people should ask for further clarification on difficult (or even difficult-to-them) topics. Yes, newbies should feel free to ask questions even if they don’t know what words will be productive search terms (but often the response is “here is a useful search term you can use in the future, and here is a thread that probably answers your question”). But not asking people to put work into explaining something so that you can avoid having to see if it’s already been explained is a good cultural practice to encourage for a lot of reasons, I think.

@pinkunz

Year day existing outside of the week structure is cute and can be neatly omitted on Leap years.

Probably this is quibbly, but: what you need on leap years is not a day you can eliminate, but to add an extra day.

[HanonO (Hanon Ondricek)]

@patrick_mooney

I think there’s also a lot to be said for a general expectation of “show you’ve tried to find the answer yourself before you ask people to do the work of explaining something to you.”

Luckily most people are friendly here and are happy to refer people to the collected knowledge base that has accumulated over the years. Usually most people aren’t so crass as to reply “RTFM” but some who ask questions regarding something like Inform 7 might need assistance to be directed where in the manual they need to look to solve their specific problem.

And as you’ve said, oftentimes it’s hard to know what exactly to search for to find the correct information here. I remember whenever I had to look up a specific format for verb conjugation in the Inform manual, I would search “sports a tory rosette” because I knew that was verbiage in one of the examples in the chapter I needed. But trying to figure out that verb conjugation is a thing that can be done and the terminology to search for might not even occur to new users.

[patrick_mooney]

I agree! Helping people build scaffolding is crucial to getting those people to achieve skills competence in general. Helpful nudges in the right direction do that well, shaming does not.

[pinkunz]

@patrick_mooney

Probably this is quibbly, but: what you need on leap years is not a day you can eliminate, but to add an extra day.

I misspoke, or misstyped, I suppose. Thanks for the correction.