1) Asking a question, but not giving all of the information that puts the question into context. This is a tough one, because you don't want to make your post too wordy (otherwise no one wants to read it), but at the same time, you need to give some information in order for people to truly help you. Quite frequently, I see questions like "Why does X happen this way?" and after a long discourse, I come to find out that they're writing a service application or something along those lines. Well, that kind of changes the answers you're going to get. Another frequent one I see is "how do I do X with declares?" Well... what platform(s) are you working on?
2) Not trying to help yourself. Some people have a tendency to ask a question without doing any research on their own. This is just human nature, and to be expected. I don't mind seeing the same questions over and over, because I can just point out the search feature of the forums. And if I'm feeling especially bored, I can do the search for you and point you to a resource. What does bother me is when I feel that the person asking the question isn't looking to understand how to do something, but is instead looking for someone to do it for them. It's fine to ask "I don't understand how to do X, can someone please send me a project that does it so I can figure it out?" -- I think that's perfectly reasonable. Everyone learns differently. But if you're that kind of learner, you need to be up front when asking your question (or responding to an answer).
3) Polls. They're useless. Enough said.
4) Pet bugs, usless posts, and "discussion starters." These all fall under the same category as "dubious information" to me. If you have a pet bug, and it pertains to the conversation at hand, that's fine. But I've seen plenty of topics where the OP says "I found a bug on the Mac" and someone responds with "if you think that's bad, check out this totally unrelated bug about drawers (or whatever)." That helps no one. Along the same vein, people who post useless comments about off-topic things in an on-topic post. For instance, "I found a bug on Vista" receives comments like "well, you shouldn't use Vista because it sucks -- I hate it." Who cares if you hate it? Unless the original post was about people's thoughts on Vista, that type of response helps no one. The third item in the "dubious information" category are "discussion starters." People post (generally in OT) intentionally inflamatory topics, such as "which is better, Mac or Windows?" and "who thinks Bill Gates is the antichrist?" Come on... don't you have better things to do?
5) My final pet peeve are people who think others are there for their own personal work horses. For instance, I see posts where the OP has a reasonable question "how do I convert X from VB into RB?" and then someone jumps in and gives a good answer. Then the OP says, "awesome! Now, how about Y, Z, A, B and C?" Whoa! That's kind of like a bait and switch -- help me with the easy question so I can slam you with the hard one later. If the OP would at least say "I've gotten this and this converted, but am still having a hard time with this" then that's cool. But just posting a four page long code snippet and saying "what about this?" is akin to peeve #2 in my book.
I've been using forums for many years now (I started helping out on forums like Experts Exchange when they first opened in the nineties -- I was the first "featured expert" actually), and this is something I see in forum after forum. The RB forums are no different from any of the others I've been on. But that doesn't make it any less peevish. ;-)
So what are your pet peeves about people's actions/responses on forums? Oh, and btw, I think that for the most part, people on the RB forums are great. There are so many extrememly helpful and patient people on our forums. It truly is a great resource to the community. I'm not posting this list in response to anything in particular, or as a way of saying "the forums suck" -- it's just a topic I've had rolling around in my head for years.
My biggest pet peeve on forums is bad topic names. I can never tell what the thread is about with "I need help!" or "Total n00b question here".
My other pet peeve is when people bring up old, old topics that reached a conclusion months or years ago, and ask a only partially related question. If you want to reference an old thread, post a link in a new topic. It will atleast show that you did some searching before hand and you can have your own topic.
Minor issues for me also include leetspeak or fragments reminecent of text messages. I occationaly use common ones, but some people go overboard and it makes readers have to translate.
Very good peeves!
I think what bugs me the most is comment after comment by the one or two individuals that do nothing but add chatter. It's all stuff that you would expect from IM.
Example: Someone posts the answer to a problem.
Person1: No Problem
Person2: Thanks, Man, that really helped.
Person3: Yeah, and this (x) is really cool too.
Person2: You're absolutely right.
Person1: Later!
And so on. It makes some posters look like they're answering questions when all they do is waste bandwidth. New people to the forums *DO* look at their number of posts and assume that if they've posted a lot they actually have something to say.
Oh yeah, and I forgot to add that I really hate it when *I* get sucked into the obvious flame baiting posts. You know the ones: "RB 2007 R3 blows up on me."
You'd think I'd be smart enough by now. Thank the powers that be for the "ignore future posts" command. :)
I agree with you there Aaron. What I don't like is:
Person1: How do I solve this problem?
Person2: This have been discussed before.
Some things change...
Arne
My biggest ones have to be:
1. Non descriptive subjects.
2. Questions with no useful details, like say, and error message. Just saying that it results in an error is not useful at all. Give us the error... the exact error! Its almost to the point where I want to wait for the user to post again and provide that before I answer it, even if the error is obvious.
3. Users who create lots of polls and start their own forums and try to get others to go over to those forums, then claim to never come back but don't stick to that statement.
4. Sometimes user's get the impression that the forums are free consulting work. No I will not write your code for you. I will give you snippets and get you going in the right direction, but you have to do the heavy lifting and hopefully learn something in the end.
I'm sure I'll think of some more later.
LoL@Mike -- I agree with your points. :-)
@Arne -- that can be annoying, depending on the question. Some questions are blindingly easy to search for and yet some people never even try. As an example: the debugger not starting up because the debug app throws a failed assertion in debuggersupport.cpp. There are very specific keywords to look for there (debugger assert or debuggersupport) and that brings you directly to the answer to your problem. Yet I see the question come up weekly.
Other times, it's hard to find the proper search terms. So I try to go easy on the user unless there's a blindingly obvious search term.
Not maybe a Peeve, rather a annoying feature of most forums: poor search functions. I find myself doing more searches on the forums using Google (adding site:forums.realbasic.com) to the Google-search.
I agree with most of your points, Aaron. My biggest pet peeve is the sucky subjects. I find that I skip over 99% of the posts because the subject does not draw me in. I know if I read more, I could help more, but I just can't make myself click on stupid subjects. Put a summary of the question in the subject, and I might take a gander.
I started helping out on forums like Experts Exchange
Great place! I'm a member since 2003 and learned a lot on those forums and also helped.
I agree with everything said, and also with the poor search engine that the phpBB forums have.
But there's one thing that irritates me: The topic's subject does NOT allow more than 60 characters! Sometimes I had to remove some important info from the subject and that does not help anyone when searching ;-)
2 suggestions: Change the forum from phpBB to vBulletin ;-) Try to create under each platform a "How To - Tutorials" forum that is a source of other posts - see an example at this forum: http://forums.site5.com/forumdisplay.php?f=64
I stopped using EE after about four years because they kept trying to force me to pay to use the site. Nevermind that I answered way more than I asked -- who wants to *pay* to help others out? Bah. So I don't use EE anymore, the concept irks me too much.