[texhax] steady decline in tug membership ?

[Reinhard Kotucha]

bruce at auswildlife.com writes:

 > I posted two questions to the group and the first response was ..."OMG,
 > does he know what he is doing?' [...]

Hi Bruce, this is indeed very unpolite and inappropriate.  Things like
this shouldn't happen.  On the other hand, this is quite untypical for
this list.  There are many people who invest an enormous amount of
their spare time in order to help others.

 > So in fact the value of membership to the group has been zero so far.

The membership fee is not spent for answering your questions.  Nobody
who helps other users gets money from TUG.

 > [...] it would be good if many of the senior/advanced members were
 > to bear this im mind and make the effort to help basic users

They actually do.

 > (telling someone to refer to a manual is not really providing any
 > help and such a response is not worth posting - is it??!!!).

In most cases people are not aware that there is documentation at all
or don't know where to search for it.  In many cases it is sufficient
to point people to the documentation.

What you can't expect is that someone reads documentation for you and
explains things which are explained already.  If something is unclear,
you are welcome to ask here, but you have to explain in detail what
exactly in the documentation is unclear.

Please don't forget that people on this mailing list already spend a
lot of time answering other people's questions.  They do not only
answer, they try to reproduce problems on their machines, they develop
code if necessary, they read documentation, they read documentation,
they read documentation, they read documentation...

Bruce, what do you expect?  Pointing people to the documentation had
always been a good idea and most people had been happy because TeX
related documentation is quite good.  They simply didn't know
what/where to search for.  Don't expect that someone does something
for you what you can do yourself.

Never forget that nobody is paid for providing help.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha			              Phone: +49-511-4592165
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