Today at the Monastery, a conversation came up about users who perpetually post without formatting forcing editors to fix their work. I had this to say on the matter:
"here's the thing - lazy people who think the world owes them something will not put in the effort as long as other people are willing to do their work no matter how much those people grumble about it
To hear people complain about the speed or the thoroughness of very free answers people recieve at this forum and others boggles my mind and yet it happens every day
I would care to wager that PM has regular visits from some of the top 50 Perl programmers world wide giving out advice/expertise they normally charge for and yet a lot of people are still very ungrateful
well - while venting (which I did) is very healthy - droning on about it forever is not - it is a fact of life, it is frustrating, but unless there is something that can be done about it effectively, I am going to shut up about it"
I just don't get this. I am by no means perfect and have often been a bit terse with my help, but honestly - what are these people thinking?
This is Lord of the Flies all over - is man inheritently good or evil. The length to which some people will go to help others is directly proportional to the extent people will take advantage and exploit that help.
So why do I continue to help..... dunno - been trying to answer that question for a long time because I have been doing it all my life. My wedding planner claimed she knew the answer by asking a simple question:
Which is more important to you
1. Being liked
2. Being important
3. Being competent
The answer for me didn't take any time - being competent. I disagreed with her conclusion though since I have no need to prove my competency to others. My ego is so big I tend to discount their opinion anyway.
It's a mad mad world.....
I've fixed dozens of posts where people have put their entire posts within the div blocks for their signatures. (When people do this, anyone using CSS to downplay or hide signatures will have difficulty reading the post.)
Clearly, there was at least one technical solution: warn and do not save any node in which all of the content is within signature tags. Since the signature mechanism gave no feedback, it was hard to blame people for doing the wrong thing.
Now they have no excuse, though.
Re:PM Formatting Editors
clscott on 2004-06-23T02:41:52
I don't know that the divs were for my signature!
Honestly, until I read your post today I had no idea, and sure enough the first time in a long time I go to post I see the new comments today.
The divs just showed up one day with no explanation
so I decided they must be for surrounding the content of the post since it appeared to have nodeid information in the "id" attribute.
Now, I know.
