Many clever people

Why do some people always post things like:
"Its in the manual, look there u idiot"
FFS, if you dont specifically know the function, its very hard to find it there. If you have a problem with the person asking for human help, dont post there. Be clever and help the other very clever people.
Maybe you are better programmers, but then why did u sign up to the forum? To give help? Y dont u do that then.

I hope now half the forum thinks i have a point, and the other half hates me.

That kind of answer goes to someone who asks the same thing over and over or doesn't bother himslef searching the board or to something that is extremely obvious and doesn't need explanation. Believe it or not, many thread fall in those 2 categories, and there is nothing you or anyone else can change about it.

i suppose you are right about posting the same question many times, but with the other one, where is the boundary for "stupid question".
I asked many stupid question when i was a beginner in PHP

dms, first of all, words 'stupid questions' did not appear in my post, and then good example of a stupid question would be 'where is the boundary for stupid question?' if you catch my drift.
I do not mean to offend you, but you did make it to my ignore list some time ago, and stayed there for a while. This is not debugging society, and generaly people expect you to find your way around once they pointed out direction to go, so my definition of "stupid question" would be not the question itself, but expectation of sombody shewing it all out for you and making nice code that will fit your currect situtation. Here is a hint for ya, it aint gonna happen in real life.

. . .unless you want to pay me to do.

The blessing and curse of open-source development is that you're expected to try and figure things out on your own. It's a blessing because you end up truly learning the stuff at the expense of time, it's a kind of a curse because it's more work- no-one spoon-feeds you the answers.

I think I can safely say there are very few experienced open-source coders who can't run rings around MCSE-in-a-box type coders- those who've taken a couple of VB courses and got a certificate.

Anyway, the types of questions I ignore are those where the person
1) Hasn't tried to solve it themselves,
2) Doesn't want to learn, just wants an answer,
3) Asks way to broad a question, while looking for a specific answer.

I ignore case 1 because I don't want to help folks who don't try to help themselves, I ignore case 2 because I don't want to keep answering the same frickin' questions over and over again, I ignore case 3 because I might take time to answer thoroughly, only to discover the person wasn't even looking for anything near what I was answering.

Here's the definite treatise on how to ask good technical questions that garner good answers:

http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

i do actually agree with what you are saying (alcapone), i havnt posted questions for a while now anyway. I just read one post 2day and someone was taking the piss out of someone else real badly, and i just thought id defend them, or see why people take the piss anyway.
if ive been annoying sorry anyway, im good in php now anyway

I agree, it seems very easy to belittle someone who knows very little if you yourself knows it all! I think they get some kind of power trip from it when all it portrays is their arrogance to help those who really need it!

Just my 2p

Dang she got me sussed

But on another note, don't you think people are just as likely to get a power trip out of helping someone, proving that they do infact have the superior knowledge?

The main reason people get belittled, flamed, attacked etc on these boards is not because of their lack of knowledge of the language they are posting about but their lack of netiquette, the fact they cannot be bothered to read the guidelines and FAQ prior to posting.

Most of the more reasonable people on here will just reply with a link to those threads, I generally check their number of postings, if it is above 5 and they are still making the same mistakes I generally will lay into them with all my flaming might and then they do infact start to get the message. Not everyone agrees with my method but well thats life.