More than likely, as users are more and more familiar with PHP, more of the questions they encounter on this site seem very basic to them. Yes, people should read the documentation. But I submit that most questions posted are not those that are easily answered in the documentation.
Sure, with a thorough understanding of all the principles in the documentation one should be able to deduce why they have to use $_GET[] in order to retrieve their variables, but there are plenty of new PHP users that just are not that familiar. There is no documentation that actually states "if your variables aren't working correctly, check register_globals," at least as far as I know. I, too, am a PHP newbie, and if there IS such a statement in the documentation, I have not yet run across it, and I have looked. I know now all about register_globals, from the documentation, and from explanations here in the forums.
I do, however, wholly support your suggestion regarding FAQs. As they are not readily available now, perhaps you should contribute some info to that end?
As for your comment about "windoze people joining the game," since when is that a bad thing? If PHP is being made available to more people, and more people are beginning to use it, please forgive my incredulity if I don't understand why you wouldn't be HAPPY about that. PHP is a good language. It's very comprehensive, not too difficult to learn, and free. Why SHOULDN'T we be getting an influx of people using it?
As an educator, perhaps you should learn from other educators and help teach people, rather than complain about the number of people asking for help. For someone that visits this form for "some years," you have an awful few number of posts. I shouldn't think you have room to complain about the forums' content unless you have been contributing yourself, don't you think?
Personally, as a PHP newbie, I have gleaned a lot of helpful information from these forums, and hope to continue to do so for some time.
