I do, I always read the fine print. Especially if its for software for me or a client.
I really don’t think the sponge community should be treating new people like this. As long as the forum is open for everyone, newbies will be entering it. And newbies will be asking simple questions that could have been answered by looking at the documentation. There is practically nothing that can be done to stop that.
We should be helping these people out. After all, they asked a question to learn something. When you tell them that they are suckers who should RTFM for asking a simple question, you are in effect representing the community as a whole for those people. And you are teaching them that they suck and this place is some sort of experts only club. That’s not a good way to present a community. And it’s not a good way to teach people either.
If your answers is helpful rather than hostile I’d put my money on that whatever else you put in your post, the person whose question was answered will pick it up as well. Which is a golden oppertunity to teach new people what they are expected to find out by themselves and where they are expected to find it out.
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I think the best thing that could be done is just direct the person to a thread where their question was answered and then lock the one they made. In the end though, it is still up to the user to look up this stuff before posting, this is pretty much how it is on other sites as well (most other sites tell you to use the search bar to find your answer first before making a new thread as a general rule of thumb).
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