Thank you for this post, paulh177.
Sadly, it will disappear into the informational ether of the forum.
It's important to note that we experienced users are trying to assist people with their problems by "remote control". The computer hardware under discussion is not in front of the person giving the answer, so it's obviously counterproductive if the person with the query does not accurately describe the problem.
Further, it's disrespectful. Without basic information such as the Puppy version being used (a frequent and glaring oversight) and the exact details of the hardware, the person giving the answer is forced to spend more of their (donated) time and analysis than would otherwise be necessary.
An even worse situation is explained in the link as such -
Simon Tatham wrote:I worked with another programmer once, who kept finding bugs in his own code and trying to fix them. Every so often he'd hit a bug he couldn't solve, and he'd call me over to help. "What's gone wrong?" I'd ask. He would reply by telling me his current opinion of what needed to be fixed.
...
But quite often he was wrong. We would work for some time trying to figure out why some particular part of the program was producing incorrect data, and eventually we would discover that it wasn't, that we'd been investigating a perfectly good piece of code for half an hour, and that the actual problem was somewhere else.
I'm sure he wouldn't do that to a doctor. "Doctor, I need a prescription for Hydroyoyodyne." People know not to say that to a doctor: you describe the symptoms, the actual discomforts and aches and pains and rashes and fevers, and you let the doctor do the diagnosis of what the problem is and what to do about it. Otherwise the doctor dismisses you as a hypochondriac or crackpot, and quite rightly so.
In other words; users should NEVER frame their question within a PRESUMED SOLUTION.
Experienced users can potentially waste their (donated) time and effort troubleshooting the PRESUMED SOLUTION when this is not the answer at all.
I recall some confused newbie on the forum once asked for detailed instructions on how to install the "linux-wlan-ng" driver (prism2_usb) and it eventually emerged that this had absolutely no relevance to their hardware. How much easier would it have been for that person to simply ask: "How do I setup my brand xx model yy rev zz device in Puppy ver xx"?
Another infamous example on the forum is "where can I obtain an updated driver for my xxx" with the blithe assumption that Puppy does not already contain an optimum driver for that device, or that configuration might play a factor, or there could be some other issue (completely unrelated to a driver) which is relevant.
There is even a forum thread here which dares to suggest that the Puppy Linux forum is somehow remiss for leaving a certain number of threads unanswered! Bizarre.
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=35502
koolie summed it up for me -
koolie wrote:Give them all a refund, I say, and a free 12-month subscription to the forum. Cost be damned.
Personally, I choose to answer posts only which interest me (apparently I have a right to choose what interests me) typically on subjects which advance the "science" of Puppy. For example; bluetooth support, touchscreen support etc.
So I browse quickly past the tedious questions which have been answered a million times before, such as "what's a tar.gz", "why can't I use make" etc.
I end this post on a light-hearted note with a classic example of a silly post -
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=30025
But then, that's Ubuntu. Check the Ubuntu forum and you will see thousands of examples of the blind leading the blind.