Rant: Why I hate help forums

[Bobtheduck]

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2063356

I've had the same issues with search as a few people on here, but THIS IS WHY I HATE HELP FORUMS... It's full of arrogant, dismissive like this one. Holy crap, they just abuse anyone who asks a question, and guess what? There is nothing even REMOTELY obvious about this. Seriously, if you act like this when people ask for help, you shouldn't be on a frelling help forum.

This isn't even close to the worst one, BTW, it's just the one I came across today. It's par for the course for these help forums to abuse the people looking for help... Calling them lazy, stupid, or using the dumbest response possible, which is "Google it." I say it's the dumbest response because the most common results on google when looking for tech help are these VERY SAME FORUMS. Anyhow, here are the ones here that got my blood boiling.

But hey, why bother looking for the solution when you can whine about it on a forum?

Because it's not an obvious solution. Perhaps if you've dedicated your life to IT, it is, but for the average user it's not. We need help for this crap.

and cooler heads prevail.

anyone else notice a lot of rant threads from lazy people lately?

It's not laziness. As it is, the only way for us "lazy" people to find these answers is on forums, because forums are all that turn up in Google searches on the subject.

Someone later said how much the search function in win 7 sucks again, and we get this

*sigh* read the thread. It's been demonstrated that there is a PEBCAK.

PEBCAK is

[quote="wiktionary"](humorous) Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard. Used by technical support helpdesk staff to indicate that the cause of a problem with a user’]

See... Why are tech people on the internet so arrogant? Honestly? Just because you eat and breath this stuff doesn't mean it's going to be as obvious to the rest of us. IN FACT, more likely than not, you were taught a lot of this stuff explicitly. It's highly unlikely you just found it all out on your own.

Also, oh mighty tech people, can you AT LEAST plop down some anti-search engine code in threads where you simply say "You could have searched for this and found the other thread we already have" so that Google searches don't come up with those threads... And no-redirectception, either. I've been to forums where they redirect (after a verbal assault about how stupid the user is) and the thread they redirect to also contains a redirect, maybe after a page or 2 of meaningless discussion...

The best part? Their advice didn't work. I opened indexing options, and it said "Waiting to receive indexing options"... For about half an hour, now. Still waiting! Of course, that leads to a new search. More forums. Fun.

[mechana2015]

Thread moved to computing.

[Bobtheduck]

While this primarily deals with Tech people, it's not so much a tech issue as a people issue, but... OK.

[goldenspines]

Instead of simply dismissing your thread as a blog worthy rant and locking it, Mech was trying to help you out. Just go with it, Bob.

You will find this type of behavior in any area of study/expertise. Some people are just arrogant about what they know and expect everyone else to have that same knowledge. Though it also doesn't me that all tech people are rude and dismissive because of a few people who don't really care to help.

Should tech (and other "experts") be more respectful and helpful? Definitely. But they currently have no obligation to be. Most of them have full time jobs and only go on tech forums for fun and to talk to others with the same knowledge (or sometimes to actually help).

[Xeno]

I only read the first page of the linked forum, but it didn't really seem that rude to me. Some people gave a suggestion, others agreed it was a mess and others said it was a PEBCAK. Overall I do agree with Goldy though, a lot of those tech forums mostly exist not as basic help forums but as places for advanced users to hang out and post about adcanced level issues they run into so they can try to crowd source solutions.

[Bobtheduck]

I think calling people lazy or the whole PEBCAK thing (dosbox and zazgood, as I quoted) was, yeah, actually pretty rude, as was "Instead of trying to find a solution, you just whine". The default settings on the search in Windows 7 are not very useful, and getting to where you can change them are not instantly obvious to the average person. I've actually had files I JUST DOWNLOADED that windows 7 search doesn't find, even after an HOUR of searching. Other times I've actually had a folder open (after I started a search) and am looking at the file, and the search still hasn't found it. No wonder it took people so long to find basic information in Star Trek. They must have continued to deal with "upgrades" like this one.

Like I said, though, this is far from the worst one I've seen. I only posted this one because I was searching for an answer to this very problem when I posted. And, honestly, even after following the advice in the thread, Window 7 still doesn't search well for me. Even after I reset my indexes.

I just see this crap (actually worse than this) every time I look for help on a tech issue. I'm also tired of only finding this stuff on forums, in particular forums where 99% of the time people are dismissive and condescending. I say 99% of the time, because out of the hundreds of tech issues I've looked up, I have found quick answers... in about 1% of the issues. The other times, I've had to wade through people suggesting I'm a moron for not knowing it instantly, and directing me to another thread that was also closed and redirected...

At the very least, I wish that searches for the SIMPLE tech issues didn't direct to 3 pages of these kinds of forum posts.

[goldenspines]

I've actually never had problems searching in Win 7, unless I'm missing something about the question. And I'm really not a tech person. (note: if I'm not sure where to be looking on my computer, I search from the Start Bar, otherwise, I search in the "library". Is there another way to search?). So honestly, it's hard to give a solution when the OP doesn't provide any details (like what version of Win7 s/he's using, computer specs, etc.). Not to mention his opening post didn't really invite helpful advice, but rather "Windows 7 sucks, tell me how to fix it."

I will agree that it can be a bit annoying to be redirected to thread after thread, though. It's happened to me a couple of times before when I was looking for a solution, but usually after some searching, I could find it.

EDIT: Oh, I see what you mean now. Searching from My Computer. Yeah, that's kind of a pain, but it usually still works for me (takes about five minutes, though).

[Bobtheduck]

I search from the start bar, and because not only does that not usually work, but it stops searching if I click away, I generally go to C drive to search after that. Either way, there are files that refuse to come up...

It always starts my searches (when I click "see more results" so I can run a search in the background rather than going into C drive specifically) in "favorites", whatever that means, and then about the only thing that comes up are Thunderbird emails. After a long chain of those, which takes a couple of minutes, it finds things outside of the email. If I could figure out how to specifically tell it to NOT search in emails, I'd be grateful.

Anyhow, after it gets done showing me every email ever written or sent to me, even when it seems unlikely those emails mentioned my search phrase, it often still doesn't find files I'm looking for, often files I had just downloaded. The worst offenders are, of course, system files (things like "hosts", which I always seem to forget their location, but which I need to edit on a regular basis) I never had this problem in Windows XP. I told it to search everywhere and include system and hidden files, and it was fine.

Even ignoring the system files, though, there are files in my MUSIC folders that it didn't seem to be able to find. I also remember I was once on a hunt to erase every rom for games I didn't own, and it couldn't find a single one of my roms... Not even the ones I could find manually.

A common side effect of my waiting is that I'll leave the search on in the background, and lo and behold, it just keeps searching, slowing my computer down drastically and often after over an hour, the file I'm looking for STILL hasn't been found. I honestly don't know what happened to my computer... I know I got ripped off, but if these problems with windows aren't normal (which a simple google search shows me that there are quite a few people with the same problem, but a lot of people who don't, too) I don't know what happened to make it so terrible for me.