From time to time, I go back through my incoming email to see if there are questions I am now willing to answer but wasn't at the time it came in. (For various reasons, I have email from last week, last month, last year, and even last century in my inbox.)

I first send email to the person of "is this still a problem, or have you solved it by now?" More often than not, my lack of response has sent them somewhere else for a satisfactory solution. So I'd be wasting my time to also solve it now.

I think that'd be true here as well. If the original poster isn't satisfied within the first few days, they'll likely seek help elsewhere. It's not useful then to re-solve the problem here, when there are so many other new timely postings each day.

Considering the "people who are willing to help" to be a limited pool, let's keep people focussed on solving the useful (current!) issues.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.


In reply to Re: unanswered questions by merlyn
in thread unanswered questions by samizdat

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.