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Date:      Thu, 07 Oct 1999 20:35:09 +0000
From:      Jeremy McMillan <aphor@ripco.com>
To:        freebsd-stable@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Roasting Newbies
Message-ID:  <37FD03FD.B719EC7C@ripco.com>
References:  <m11ZMqo-0007zMB@relay.ripco.com>

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Pardon me if I make a suggestion, but we need to distinguish between newbies
and lamers. We are users who are part of a development community. We
advocate FreeBSD to people who live in caves and eat bugs. Then we get all
freaked out when the cave-dwellers don't understand the system.

A newbie may deserve help on freebsd-stable: maybe being someone having
trouble with following, building, or running a STABLE machine.

A lamer is someone who cannot (because they will not) help themseves and
will try to get you to do their work for them for free, so that they can do
the same thing to someone else, after they screw up what you walked them
through.

grok my ascii Venn diagram (down with proportional font email!)

/---------------------\
| Newbies             |
|   /-----------------+---\
|   |  Newbie Lamers  |   |
\---+-----------------/   |
    |              Lamers |
    \---------------------/

The more newbies we help to avoid lamerdom, the bigger and better the
FreeBSD following/community.

The more lamers we waste our time (or grief) on, the less newbies we can
help to avoid lamerdom.

The more flames we direct at lamers, the more time and grief we waste on
lamers.

The solution is to have a document on the web which euphemistically explains
how to help yourself do FreeBSD without calling anyone a lamer. It should
tell newbies why it is rude to ask people on freebsd-stable how to configure
ppp. 

-- 
PLEASE NOTICE: THERE MAY BE NOSPAM IN THE HEADERS WHEN YOU HIT "REPLY"!!!
Jeremy McMillan <aphor at  ripco.com> | Ask for PGP-2.6.2 or 5.0i
Chicago FreeBSD Users Group
http://pages.ripco.com/~aphor/ChiFUG.html


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