Numpties and numpty alerts

I hope Eric doesn't mind, but I have taken it upon myself (when I have the time) to flag numpty postings.

Symbian and Symbian OS are British, as too is the word numpty. For those of you who have no idea what the word means -  you'll soon get the idea.

The reason I am doing this is because I am sick of the volume of posting on here by people asking for help (why is it always urgent!!!!! help?) in doing work which they should be doing. Don't get me wrong, I am all for helping people who have genuine questions and need help and assistance (apart from NumptyAlert I have a few other handles which I use on this site and am constantly answering questions and helping people, there are hundreds and hundreds of postings by me but enough is enough).

No, it is the people who haven't tried that I am fed up with. Software development takes effort and thought, the people on here who know the answers on here have in the past put in much thought and effort and they can share their experience, but why should they if you can't be bothered in the first place.

An example of a posting where somebody hasn't done any thought or effort beforehand, and thus will be flagged as a numpty posting, is where a large chunk of code is pasted and we're told it has an error and we're asked what the error is. And that's it, we're not told anything else.

Debugging takes time and effort, why should we help you in this situation if you first haven't made any attempt to find out the problem for yourself.

An example of what you could have done before you posted the code is to find out exactly what line in all those lines of code you posted caused the problem. This should be an automatic first step whenever you have a defect, why didn't you do it? Are you too lazy or just too stupid to realise this?

If you're running your code on the PC then it's simple to step through the code line by line until you find the line causing the problem. Then if its an exception, or a leave or a panic, if you know which line it happening at you can probably also know what the cause is. If not, then maybe that's an example of when we can help you (but only provided you first looked up in the SDK what panic number x or leave reason y meant).
If you haven't identified which line your code fails at? Why the hell not?
If your code is running on hardware, you can still step through it depending on your version etc. If not then you can at least put some calls User::InfoPrint() or similar in your code to find the offending line.
If you do this sort of thing you might find you don't need our help after all as chances are the problem will be obvious, maybe not, but if you don't even try to find out then why should we waste our precious time if you can't be bothered to think a little and apply a little effort first?

There are many reasons why a posting could be a numpty posting but if you exihibit a total lack of brains, or effort, or inginuity or effort, to try to help yourself first then I'm sorry but you're too stupid to develop in Symbian in the first place as its a complex system and any help from us will be wasted anyway and the world is better off without your crappy software in it.

Good luck and don't get numptied with your posting.

P.S.

If I reply to one of your postings it doesn't necessarily mean you are a numpty however, you may just be inexperienced and in which case I may try to guide you through what your thought processes should be and what you should be thinking or can try in order to attempt to find the problem for yourself - Teach a man to fish and he can feed himself.