RTFM experiences

Andrew Gilfrin spoke right from my heart, telling about his "Read the ******* manual" experiences, as I unfortunately had to make quite similar experiences a while ago.

At that time, I started to look through some German speaking newsgroups and tried if I could help people. There were some other supporters around, but at most questions they didn't leave much more than those RTFM comments or other rather rude answers. I complained about that in those newsgroups and asked, why they give any answers at all, if they don't really want to help, why don't they just ignore it? The answer was once again not very polite and finally I was so frustrated that I gave up reading the German newsgroups.

A little later I had the luck that some English newsgroups have become available through my provider and I got an eye on those. Here, there's a very much more friendly atmosphere and I love to read through them and also give help, if I can. No comparison to the German newsgroups!

First of all, I'd like to mention Bill Karwin. This guy spends a lot of time to give great help to many people who are looking for support. He's always polite, very skilled and if nobody else can give good help, he probably can. I don't know him or had contact to him personally, but I found out that he is the kind of MySQL Community Member that MySQL needs!

Also in the MySQL forums, most people show very good manners. That's one of the big reasons why I found my way into the Community and preferably to the English speaking media, simply because people there were and are friendly and not stupidly competing against each other (who's the best?), but really trying to help and get out the best for both who need help and the supporters themselves (helping also means learning). As long as there are people who do this great work, I have no worries about MySQL and its Community, at all.