dougv.com « Doug Vanderweide

Those of you who know me from Yahoo! Answers may be wondering why you don’t see quite as much of my answers around. As recently as last week, I was answering as many as 60 questions a day.

Part of that is now that the holidays have passed, I’m busier with paying projects. But a bigger reason is that I’ve rethought which questions I am going to answer. It occurred to me recently that there’s a huge difference between quantity and quality, and in addition, I’m taking a bit more offense than I should with poorly worded questions, stupid questions and people who reward wrong answers with “Best Answer.”

I know full well when I answer a question whether the questioner even understands what he is asking, nonetheless the answer I give. And I know, even better, the cliche that one should never teach pigs to sing, because it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

I also know better than to answer when it’s not needed or counterproductive, and it occurs to me that not following my own common sense makes me a fool.

So, from here on out, I’m using these basic guidelines for Yahoo! Answers:

If your question makes no sense whatsoever, I’m not going to try to figure out what you are talking about. And I’m not just referring to the surfeit of Indians trying to ask complex programming questions when they know all of five English words. I’m talking about questions that clearly indicate total confusion on a subject.

It’s one thing, for example, to call JavaScript “Java” or ask what “codes” you need to, say, get a certain recordset from a database. It’s quite another to ask, “Vb code for create database ADO with the help of coding help me plz.?“, which, not coincidentally, is the question that, as I was answering it, made me realize I was on a fool’s errand and needed to rethink which questions I should answer.

If a question already has a correct answer, I’ll thumbs-up the correct answer and move on. Nothing is more annoying, or potentially more confusing, than providing the same answer to a question that’s been answered correctly. More likely than not, the subtle differences between two right answers will only serve to confuse the questioner, and that’s contrary to the idea. So, if I see a good answer, I’ll mark it as such and move on to the next thing.

If a questioner clearly cannot fathom a correct answer, I’ll skip answering it. This may come off as arrogant, but I do an exceptional job of explaining complex things in simple terms. But I can only dumb things down so far, or hold your hand so long; you have to have the capacity and desire to learn. Nothing pisses me off more than giving a correct answer that I’m certain can be understood, only to have the retard who asked the question, because he doesn’t even understand what he asked, nonetheless any of the answers he got, vote as Best Answer something that is utter nonsense.

For example, there’s this dipshit, who gave Best Answer to someone who simply filibustered, even though I gave him a downloadable code and a full discourse, just as he asked. There’s also this idiot, who voted for the guy who simply plagiarized my earlier answer, and got the parts he added to my answer wrong. And just to prove this is no anomaly, there’s this moron, who gave Best Answer to a person who spewed anti-intellectual diarrhea all over the place.

If you don’t speak English, or use 1337 / StUdLyCaPs, or otherwise prove yourself a functional illiterate, I’ll move on. If you cannot, or do not, make yourself understood when you are seeking help, you cannot, or will not, understand my answers.

No more stupid questions (and yes, there are stupid questions). If your question could easily be answered with a simple search engine query, or by anyone who’s worked a computer for more than 30 seconds, I’ll move on. For example: Where can I find free message boards? How do I change the background picture on my screen? Where can I find tutorials for Dreamweaver?

No more non-programming questions. There are plenty of computer questions that aren’t related to programming but which are complicated. And there are hundreds of help desk people in the Computers & Internet section of Yahoo! Answers. They can handle questions about how to restore icons or what may be causing a given error. I’ll stick with what I know. There are also lots of people who can write basic HTML, JavaScript and SQL; I’ll start ignoring those questions, too.