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Is it just me...

 
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Or do these forums seem to be tending towards the same degradation that has afflicted every other Java forum I've visited. I occassionally have the masochistic urge to actually peruse Sun's forums only to find them populated with annoying children who don't bother to do their own work. You know who I'm talking about, their questions almost always take one of two forms:

1. "Can you teach me programming? PLZ PLZ PLZ PLZ PLZ THX"

or

2. "Can someone please post source for my homework? Thx."

The only thing worse is the children that follow with insults and other crap that serves no other purpose than to egg people on and get in the way of finding real information with a search.

When I started learning Java and visited these forums a couple years ago they were exactly the opposite. Most questions had thought behind them, they were answered intelligently and politely. For the most part, responses have never been particulary rapid but they were there.

Now I might be losing it, but I could swear I'm seeing more and more of the above examples and fewer intelligent answers. Personally, I'm afraid Javaranch is going to end up like Sun's forums as the imbeciles flood in wanting their work done for them and people like Ernest Friedman-Hill simply give up trying to sort it out and disappear.

So am I delusional or has anyone else noticed it?
 
author and iconoclast
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I'm not going anywhere.

As the seasons change, so does the population. September brings in new students, who don't yet know the ropes. Summer brings in interns, asked to write real code for the first time ever. And of course the world changes, as time goes by. We'll keep trying to maintain the kind of environment we enjoy being in. Thanks for caring, and please, if you can, lend a hand.
 
Ken Blair
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I never thought about it like that.
 
High Plains Drifter
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The long view works well. I've been here five years now, and EFH is right on the money. Look at the whole system. Yeah we get that cultish pseudo-jabber for a bit and we get lots of lazy questions. The good news is, if you hang around, you see that stuff eventually loses interest and what makes JavaRanch great holds on.

We've been through some bitter stuff: worries about lawsuits, worries about divisions in our own community (talk around 9/11 comes to mind), the occasional no-goodnik starving for attention that has nothing better to do than post here all day long (but not you! EFH, I don't mean you!)...

And yet we still have a great site. We got a fly that's been going in and out of that moose for a long time and has yet to get any snot on it. That's as good a sign as we're going to get that we're doing things right.
 
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Originally posted by Ernest Friedman-Hill:
I'm not going anywhere.

As the seasons change, so does the population. September brings in new students, who don't yet know the ropes. Summer brings in interns, asked to write real code for the first time ever. And of course the world changes, as time goes by. We'll keep trying to maintain the kind of environment we enjoy being in. Thanks for caring, and please, if you can, lend a hand.



Bravo!
 
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Dont know about all forums at Ranch. But I'm sure that you would find it good. Ofcourse, some newbies asks some silly questions like you mentioned, but those are not really silly. Some of those questions are because they are new to java or others because they thought Ranch is a code mill.

Have you ever noticed Bear Bibeault. He never does spoon feeding kind of thing. I used to be on Servlet, JSP, and Apache Tomcat forum mostly. All the ranch hands there doing great job and we are noticing a dramatic improvement in newbies. I have seen how some folks become a real Ranch hand in a year. I'm sure other forums are also having Ranch hands working like bartenders because its fun to help.

I know some folks who never asked a single question and answer more than 3k times. All quality posts, I must say.
 
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