@^

I would not deny most of the things you said. And as far as english language is concerned, no yells you at face for small things. And everybody knows that this is a forum attended by worldwide members and not everyone has english as their first language. Its not first language for me either. So I understand what you say.
And newbies are helped wherever they post. They are warned not to hijack posts and are politely asked to provide more information. And our mods are quite considerate as well. What happened to you was one experience. I would not comment on that because I have not seen your that post. But LQ surely is much better to newbies. Quite well I would say. And I say this because I was a newbie as well.

In terms of the telling off, we do ask that people actually try to help with the problem as well as mention the grammar. The only time there is an exception to that is where the question itself is utterly incomprehensible

Well, if I have a problem reading and understanding a thread, I can do one of two things:

1) Ask for clarification, or reformulation.

2) Ignore the thread.

It kinda depends on my mood and on the post. If clearly the OP made no attempt to make themselves understood, I will choose #2. If it looks like the OP is not a native English speaker, I will choose #1.

Either way, it's very likely the OP will never get a good answer. If nobody can understand your question, how can they answer it ?

And OP seems to have run to some Himalayan caves.

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He did the right thing.

I dont know if he will find Lord Shiva there, but certainly some peace and penance. He will miss us though.

@bjrn64

I found that very difficult to read.

At least could you put a dot after every sentence?

I agree, it is difficult to read, but I've seen worse.

I also understand that, for various reasons, some people ask questions that are difficult to understand, and that these should be treated equally. Yet, how can they be ? Am I really gonna waste my time and nerve reading a huge paragraph of very badly written English text, or move on and answer a question I can understand ?

At the very least, if you know you can't write good English, write short statements, use at least newlines to separate these, make them as simple and understandable as possible.

This is why I say I have an easier time with non-native English speakers / writers, it's because they keep things short and simple. Sometimes details are lacking, but these are often clarified later. However, if someone writes a huge paragraph without any punctuation, nor even a Capital letter at the beginning of every sentence, I simply cannot read it. Call it my handicap. I get through about 2 or 3 normal sentence-worth of words and then I quit, because I can't take it anymore, it's not making any sense to me. This happens with books too, stuff like a badly translated Kant. Terrible stuff, I can't take it.

I try to keep in mind that the ostensible purpose of the forums here is to help the OP solve his issue.
I received some responses that had a definite tone of sarcasm on LQ, also. Rather than rising to the bait, I look for any valuable suggestions in the post and ignore the negative comments. Often the posts do contain helpful information, and, ignoring what I perceive as sarcasm, I have thanked such posters for furthering my understanding. I have learned to test my proposed solutions before posting them after making several more or less severely misleading and wrong suggestions.
Some threads seem to degenerate into ego trips or flame wars which turn the discussion off course from what the OP was asking about. I find a tiny bit of humor from seeing such antics. However, off-topic, disparaging or derogatory comments can interfere with the willingness of people to seek help here on the forums. This degrades the "signal to noise ratio" of the forum, reducing the quality of the responses.
Being polite takes patience, especially when it is the umpteenth time that question has been answered on the forum. But a new visitor has not seen the umpteenth-1 times it has been posted. The volume of the content on this site is daunting to a novice like me. A reference to a previous answer and suggestion about how to search for answers to issues is a more helpful and encouraging response.
I learned long ago that the only stupid question is the one that I did not ask when I should have asked.
Finally, I want to thank all of you for the time you spend on this site. Is my belief that this is volunteer work, rather than a paid job, correct? It is a great site and very helpful.

One thing you got to remember too is that we are here free of charge giving away free hobbyist technical support to anyone who asks for it.

IMO, we kinda have a right to be rude, especially, as others have stated, when there is a blatantly obvious problem with the post; such as a super old distribution or incomprehensible language. I think H_TeXMex_H makes an excellent point that a rude post is better than ignoring it.

I also agree with H_TeXMex_H when he states the importance of at least an attempt at good grammar and stuff. I mean, who cares if there is a miscue here or there, but with me, everything boils down to this word: try.

If I see a member post and is not trying, why should I try? I find it blatantly rude to make a post with hardly any info or attempt at explaining things. If I see the OP try, I want to help him because he is trying and that's what matters.

The way I see it, the quality of my post depends on yours.

Yes and no. When I first began using Linux (when I were a lad...) it was very much a geeks/hackers/programmers system and rudeness was taken as a standard. Calling people idiots and worse was normal because that's the way the groups spoke among themselves. Now though, Linux is used by everyone and that sort of behaviour is not the standard among the new expanded group.

It has been long recognised that things would change as Linux gained new users and a bit of politeness and hand holding is, I'm afraid, something we need to get used to.

Well, I've never called anyone on here an idiot ... even tho sometimes I do feel like it. I wouldn't call anyone an idiot, but I wouldn't do too much hand-holding either, only if the OP truly is trying and wanting to succeed. Some users post something like: "Help me out, or else I'm switching back to Window$" ... in that case I say go right ahead and switch back, because it is obvious that users like this are going to quit sooner or later, and if later they are likely to waste peoples' time in the process. Users that say "Please help, I've been trying for weeks to fix this and I simply can't figure it out", these users deserve more attention than the previous example.

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