[Typo3] Helping new users - was [menu item image gets cut offor truncated]

[Christopher]

On 21/10/05, Alex Heizer <alex at tekdevelopment.com> wrote:

> >I think the first thing you should try to learn is how to ask questions in a
> >way, that will enable people to help you.
> >Give them enough information and they will do what they can to solve the
> >problem.
> >
> >
> Personally, if everyone is asking questions in a certain way, rather
> than suggest that they don't get answers because their questions aren't
> in our favored format, we need to be changing our own ways of thinking
> so that we can continue to meet their needs.


It's not a question of _format_, its simply that questions CAN be (and
frequently are) asked badly. Joey was pointing out -- correctly, I
think -- that, in order for any kind of meaningful answer to be given,
the person asking the question MUST provide at least _some_ relevant
information. If they can or will not do this, then they will get poor
answers or none at all -- and it's not the fault of the people
answering the questions.

One problem is clearly that it's difficult for beginners to know what
the relevant information is in the first place, but another is
definitely that more than a few questions on this list are asked so
poorly that _nobody_ could answer them as asked...

I'm inclined to think that one of the best ways of sorting out the
problem of new users not knowing what information to provide would be
to really limit the starting points for learning the system...I've no
real practical suggestion at the moment, but if all or most new users
had been through a similar or identical tutorial, then we as
question-answerers might be able to be more confident about a) what
they already know and b) what they probably won't know yet. Maybe it's
time for the canonical getting started document?

-Christopher