My rant

[mchuskie]

I'm ill, please excuse me.

First of all - people who don't know what punctuation is. If I have to spend ten minutes deciphering their message, I feel much less inclined to actually respond to them. It's not difficult - all required keys are provided on most standard keyboards, and it makes posts much more legible.

Spelling - another bee in my bonnet. Particularly in spelling commands etc, as confusing two different spellings could confuse two commands, leading to potentially horrific circumstances.

Talking of confusing commands - surely the most-asked question on these boards is the whole su/sudo/root thing. As a SuSE migrator it took a little while to get used to, admittedly, but it's not that hard - particularly when it's explained in one of every three threads. See also "adding extra repositories".

All that said, I will still continue to offer help where I can, when I can; simply because I enjoy helping people, and I know that should I fall into difficulty, there are like-minded people who will help me.

Ahh, I feel better now.

[lmilano]

Re: My rant



I think we need a very visible link to the Kubuntu FAQ in the main page. Or maybe produce our own Read This Before Posting section, brief but informative.

We also need people to give more descriptive explanations. Sometimes you get a one liner post, like "KDE not starting".  Impossible to help in these conditions.

Also, people who don't even bother telling you if your post helped them out. Or just drop a line to say "thank you".  These things are a turn off. 

Otherwise, I love the K/Ubuntu community.

[Open Source]

Re: My rant

If you would like to make up a post like "Read this First" to be made into a sticky, we can do that. I agree, redundant questions are very annoying. People having problems come here, don't bother searching, and then just post a question immediately. Do, you really think you are the first person with such a question? I understand your feelings, and appreciate your help and patience. Please continue helping, and I guess, just post links to other topics or sites when possible.

Thanks,
Open Source

[Auisce]

Re: My rant

I'm sorry for my bad punctuation and spelling; I have real excuses:

I'm using a very strange keyboard

my dog ate part of my keyboard

sometimes I have to use an alternative character where I have a key missing or I just can't find where the key went, for example for.a.few.days.all.of.my.typing.looked.like.this.b ecause.my.space-bar.disappeared.

Linux isn't managing my keyboard very well

sometimes my apostrophes become accents over a letter and I don't know how to fix that

I sometimes drop capitalisation because Linux is case sensitive and it becomes habit

as with Windows the bl**dy spellcheck is American which makes things confusing and makes me doubt myself; even when I spell something correctly the spellcheck says it's wrong >


I'm sure there's more but I presume you get the point; I'm very sorry if my abuse of the English language offends.

[javierrivera]

Re: My rant

Spelling - another bee in my bonnet. Particularly in spelling commands etc, as confusing two different spellings could confuse two commands, leading to potentially horrific circumstances.

Is it very difficult to make a firefox spelling dictionary?

It will be very helpful to have a bash/ubuntu one, to to make the dam.. lovely firefox able to mark mistakes like dphg-recongifure. It will make misspelling in command more difficult.

Javier.

[dibl]

Re: My rant

This an international forum -- I'm damned lucky it is conducted in any kind of English. While perfect grammar and punctuation are a requirement of my profession, I turn the sensitivity way down on my "English meter" when using these forums, and recommend other native English speakers do likewise. It's not literature, after all ....



However, I notice that Linux doesn't accept approximations on the CLI, so James' point regarding the quoting of computer commands is well-taken. They need to be spelled correctly.