[Zope] Re: checking what you post

[Tom Neff]

There is a difference between

 * posting quick&dirty code or suggestions that are prominently LABELED as
"untested - try at your own risk," as people sometimes do here; versus

 * Making up an answer off the top of your head, when you have never checked
to see whether it really works or is really true, and posting it WITHOUT any
warning to that effect.

Now, I personally think that even when someone says "I need to sort a
subfolder by date times temperature" [etc] and a DTML savvy member replies
"Here, this ought to work - untested, try at your own risk" followed by some
DTML, it would have been a little better if they took 60 seconds and threw
it into a dummy method to make sure before posting, but I appreciate that
not everyone has the time and it's better to at least get something to try.
But if you can test first, I still hope you will.  (I did, even on that
silly little Content-Type: tip, even though I've used the technique several
times before, because I didn't want to suffer the indignity of posters
pointing out "Uh, you forgot the ______".)

But what I have no patience for is outright MIS-information, posted as if it
were reliable fact, when a moment's checking would have disproved it.
People actually RELY on the stuff they read here - they try to go use it in
their work, and/or pass it on to others.  It's archived, and people can look
it up later.  It's a busy list, and not everybody has time to hang out for a
week waiting for corrections.  That's why I say that we owe it to ourselves
and the Zope community to take that extra moment and CHECK what we wrote,
before posting it.  The trade-off is abundantly worth it.