Once again, some idiot who doesn’t know his arse from his elbow, reads a couple of my articles, and announces to the world I’ve got it wrong. Strangely enough, on reading the “mistakes” it turns out it is the idiot that is incorrect, because he doesn’t know what a “#” comment is, he can’t use the correct terminology and he obviously hasn’t read the manual on the subject he is waxing lyrical about!
I would like to make a suggestion. If you think you’ve found a mistake in someone else’s work, whoever they are, you should do the following:
- Read the article again to make sure you’ve understood it.
- Contact the author to confirm a mistake is present.
- If it turns out you are mistaken, have the decency to admit it, rather than trying to prolong the debate, thus wasting everyone’s time.
There are lots of people providing good content on the internet for free and it is inevitable that some mistakes will slip through. What we don’t need is a bunch of people waiting to jump on the slightest mistake and make a big deal out of it, or even worse, try to find fault where the is no fault.
Personally, I don’t mind people contacting me to ask about the contents of my articles. That’s why I have a comments section on the end of each article, a forum and a “Contact” page. What does get on my nerves is when I read posts on other forums where people criticize my articles without bothering to contact me, especially when the criticism is unfounded.
It seems these days we want everything for free, but when we get it we really don’t appreciate it.
Rant over 🙂
Cheers
Tim…
Hi sir,
Take a chill-pill:-).Just will say that you articles are an immense help to me andI am sure to alot many!Dont bother about those who dont appreciate /value what they get coz its their bad luck and small brain!Keep up the good work!You are the best:-)!
best regards.
Aman
>> “Once again, some idiot who doesn’t know his arse from his elbow, reads a couple of my articles, and announces to the world I’ve got it wrong.”
Yep, I’ve seen this frequently, and I deliberate hold-back scripts and just present concepts of some of my web content to make people “think” and not just give them the working code.
The problem with making people think is it incorrectly assumes you know what their preconceptions, experience and mind-set are. Some will come to your expected conclusion, some will come to a wildly different conclusion (which may or may not be justified), and some will just be frustrated. In our field, I would expect a high proportion of the latter simply because a lot of success comes from being extremely precise and literal.
Certainly some of the worst high school math teachers I had didn’t get this at all. In distant retrospect, they look even worse.
word verification: ugwjyz
would you expect it to be pwetty?
I’ve just had a ‘your article should mention X needs to be done’, when the article in question has a sentence which reads ‘Make sure you do X, because it won’t happen automatically’!!
That’s not me being factually wrong. It’s not me having made a mistake in writing the article. It’s just a plain error on the part of the “reader” (in inverted commas because it’s pretty evident he didn’t actually do much reading).
Making people guess what you meant by ‘holding things back’ is a different matter entirely, and an author that does that deserves every bit of abuse/correction/clarification they get!