[wp-forums] Err, spiraling out of control?

[Podz]

> http://wordpress.org/support/topic/67498?replies=16

There has always been the occasional thread which becomes ..... 
unhelpful at some point. And then the OP is actually helped or told to 
start a new thread where they can be assisted anew. It's happened many 
times before and will do again.

Regardless of anyone's site, opinions or otherwise if they ask for help 
we should give it. If their site is something you are uncomfortable with 
then don't help. There is no requirement to say you won't help and why - 
someone else will happen along and take the task.

A couple of years ago or even more recently people would come to the 
forums having tons of errors. I remember someone with over 460 - but 
forums help and people did and the post people make when together with 
forum helpers they make their site validate is wonderful to read - you 
can tell they are really pleased. And isn't that why we do it?
If someone doesn't understand validation, if someone doesn't understand 
that 200 errors actually could mean just 60, if someone doesn't 
understand that one error can cancel out another and if someone doesn't 
know that our help is going to be limited because of the errors then 
that is not their fault. Neither is it ours - but we have the knowledge 
and we need to pass that on first to get their attention, second to get 
them to agree and third to get them to work with us to get things 
better. Threads like that are long, they take work, they take patience - 
but again we aren't just here for the snappy answer or to just help 
someone whose site we like.
Someone write a really good post about validation and why it's important 
from our point of view. Then we can usefully point people at it.

When did we get all elite? When did we raise the bar for all questions? 
When did we decide that we want it good before we move to help?
You can argue that it's not WP ("What IS WordPress help? Discuss") and 
in some ways you could argue that's correct but was it actually so bad a 
request? It was just CSS and we help with that all the time.

And getting back to validation - I've seen posts where someone has 
directed the OP to get validated first even when the validation errors 
are very minor and have zero impact on appearance or functionality. It's 
not a cloak to hide behind.

Anyone spot the link spammer? It's in their interests to stir the pot.. 
so they duck under the noise.

Hopefully that thread can be looked at in the cold light of day (so to 
speak) and something learned about it not happening again. It will of 
course - but hopefully different people will be involved :)

P.