Re: Context Indication

benn,
While I fully appreciate your comments in regards to context, I disagree with your proposal. I believe the responsibility should be directed towards the posting monk.

I have asked similar questions here and here, but have failed to understand what was being said. Here is what I thought I knew.

I tried the solution provided here, but I didn't understand it and am not able to apply it to this general situation here

I admit, originally I didn't want to understand why, just how. I have seen the error of my ways, please enlighten me.

I may be wrong, but I don't believe this question deserves the generic answers because my situation is different. This is why I think it is different. If I am wrong and one of the general solutions will work, please explain it keeping in mind I am rather new at this.

etc, etc, etc

Now this isn't to say that the monks at the Monastery are not willing to do the "problem profiling". I have done all the same things you are talking about. I have looked at previous writeups by the same monk, applied my knowledge of CB conversations when answering questions, etc. In fact, I learned quite a bit about OIDs recently trying to reply to a post using The Oracle and CPAN since the AM assumed all OIDs were created equal and didn't provide enough context to help.

So while I feel context is very important and believe it should be the poster's responsibility for giving it, there will always be monks that go the extra mile. I feel that spending the time and effort in making the changes to PM will not help, but rather, re-inforce the idea that it is ok to post questions and just expect others will know what you are talking about.
I can see it now:

Anonymous Monk - how do I do X?
Limbic~Region - it depends, in what context are you doing X?
Anonymous Monk - What! You didn't profile the problem? It is obviously Y context.

Just my thoughts - L~R

Comment on Re: Context Indication

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Re: Re: Context Indication by graff (Chancellor) on Sep 07, 2003 at 02:31 UTC
Amen, brother! God, wouldn't it be sweet if we saw more SoPW posts that asked questions in the manner of your bullet-list examples... I think if more people really tried opening their posts with statements like that, some of them might figure out the answers before they hit the submit button.	[reply]
Re: Re: Context Indication by zby (Vicar) on Sep 08, 2003 at 10:29 UTC
I must say I agree with you, and the bulleted list is really great. But it is only the first step to the real solution to the problem. The next is to ask how do we ancourage this kind of behaviour. You could add this to the site FAQ, but I believe the FAQ is not very effective. It is the 'one click away' and that is enough for people to not look there. Perhaps there the most important excerpts from the FAQ should be presented above the SOPW input page? Or maybe the link to SOPW input should go through the FAQ?	[reply]