The "ask first look later" approach is one of the silliest I have seen on the internet. It's a worldwide
library for Christs's sake - reading IS mandatory.
But, that said, I can also tell you that I run a forum, very much like this one, with pictorials and everything about how/what/why you do what you do to achieve the build of a product yourself, versus buying some pre-made POS at a store that won't last two years.
There too, we get an endless diatribe of older well known, crap, along with the questions that people cannot be bothered to do a search on. I even built sticky stacks of posts in each section to illuminate known processes and procedures and the exact sequence from one to the next....
I too try and not asking dumb crap - unless, I had confused myself
from reading posts on multiple distilling forums. I like the answers and the humor I get here. I've not yet seen any harshness from any one. I don't mind being told to search, if it's already documented.
But, i do want to make a point in general about how data is arranged - If it's really hard to find, or has a ton of cross talk across 46 pages in a thread, the meaning is lost and quickly. Humans in our modern age are impatient by nature-the speed of the net causes it-every damn thing is
Right now or I'll look elsewhere. And sometimes, that's bad, because the links you find out there can either be golden, or some ten day old candy bar left outside....
The cross talk (off topic in a thread) is
not so prevelant here, but elsewhere, I have seen where 18 pages of thread had only 2 pages of meaningful relevance. Most times on my sites, we try and prune that and sorta thing and then make a sticky outa the true process, but even then, feelings can get hurt by those whose comments we moved into the off topic area
The Vbulletin.org site (where modifications to this forum code comes from) is about the worlds worst. In any given thread there, you see at least 20 posts asking; "Will this work on my version?"(Despite a text block in each modification that clearly lists the versions of the software it works on)...
All it takes is a bit of patience, persistience, and remember to search by different points of view So, understanding things can share two labels of definition allows a wider search perspective. Not to mention that when speaking to folks in other countries, this can affect stuff too. This is especially true with musical material searches, where a song you hear on the bluegrass top 40 was really a celtic tune from 1643, just a different name, and older lyrics..
Now, back to reading...