We no longer say RTFM, read the fucking manual, anymore. I wonder why that is. Is it because more and more projects are moving all documentation to discord?
Some projects still have manuals… But there seems to be less expectation people will familiarize themselves with manuals anymore. I wonder why
I guess we need Watch The Fucking Video these days don’t we… :)
People don’t read articles anymore, most people at least. They want some YouTube influencer explaining it quickly.
I would love to RTFM if vendors would provide anything resembling them. Grrrrrr.
Like, I work with a lot of FOSS projects in my hobby-time. The absolute bulk of them have extensive documentation (online rather than printed, but it at least exists). At work, when my org pays a vendor big $$$$ for a solution, we’re lucky to get a Word doc with a few unhelpful screenshots because they expect us to keep them on retainer for any support/technical issues.
Nerd rage over lol.
Forums: “Having an issue? Just read the manual!”
Manual:
If you have any issues, please contact a user on our forum.
And good riddance. It was a dick-ish response to people who were already having a bad day. That said, you really can solve a lot of your problems by reading the manual (if one exists). And it certainly beats the hell out of the shit-show which is Discord “support”. At least a manual is usually searchable and has some answers. And a good forum is usually also searchable and possibly indexed by major search engines (e.g. Google).
This.
The trend to moving to discord is crappy for numerous reasons - the biggest one because i refuse to supply a phone number as the price of admission. Second, it’s hard to find and search through old content on the platform. It’s just a crap, proprietary rehash of IRC.
I’m sure it’s great to be on the white-hot front of development for new projects, but to name a few… Podman, PipeWire, Etcd… full documentation is patchy at best, a lot of common use cases aren’t answered unless you find something on the Arch Wiki (for instance) - They’re all great projects, but goddamn is it hard to find simple answers, and the more stuff moves off of github issues or forums and onto shit like discord, the less easy it is to even get a grip on the problem.
First I’ve heard of it.
Programmer thing?
