Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2005-12-03 12:21:01 - Graham Ellis
"Do you answer questions from ANYONE on your Opentalk forum, or just from people you've trained" ... Asked by a delegate on last Friday's MySQL course.
I answer good questions from anyone. Questions from people who've been on courses tend to be excellent questions - on topic, not easily resolved by a quick look at regular reference material, and written in a language that's common to me and the questioner (the Queen's English). Questions asked by people who've not been on courses, on the other hand, tend to be fuzzier and sometimes hard to understand and sometimes I get the feeling that the questioner hasn't bothered to think that someone's giving his time up for free to answer.
You'll notice I've used the word "tend" there and it IS just that - a tendency. It's actually quite rare for a past trainee to ask a poor question / ask poorly which rather goes to show that people leave our course with a knowledge to thing and understand the subject that we've covered even if we can't possibly have answered every question they have within the handful of days they were with us. And any question of this type from someone I know can quickly by clarified / improved with an email.
I'll try to help people I don't know who ask poor questions too - but often this will be a little frustrating and these days I give up quite quickly; sorry, but I'm not going to plug through 200 lines of source code because you've reported "does not work" and not even told us what the error message is. Nor am I going to provide a complete "correspondence course" on PHP via the forum and a series of question and answers over a long period; it's simply not the best way to learn the whole subject and the questioner should really go on a course - if Melksham's not convenient, there are other courses in far flung corners of the world ...
4th December ...Adding on to here ... if people are gracious enough to "give back" - for example to follow up with "yes that worked" or "that didn't work because ..." then I've got all the time in the world for them; they're giving back to me and to the forum, helping us build up an ongoing resource that others will find (and find useful too) when they do a Google search.
If I spend a long time crafting an answer and I get nothing back - then am I going to be so keen to help that same person in the future? It really doesn't need to be much to complete a thread or a correspondence but I'll admit to being just slightly shocked at the rudeness of the guy from New Zealand who wants to set himself up as a python trainer, and the woman from Iowa who's so busy selling hosting enough for three pages at 9 a year that she hasn't the time to even say "Thanks" let alone help me complete the story her thread started to weave.