Handling Sensitive Users

laserlight

To all ye who help out to answer questions here...

How would you have responded to Eline in PHP forms cross-MySQL-table read-write question?

I find that sometimes I do ignore the direct question in favour of a "ah, but this other is wrong to begin with" approach. It seems to have backfired quite badly here, but I do not understand why Eline would get angry at a book suggestion due to lack of time, and yet go on to watch YouTube tutorials, when a book (or text based online tutorial) would be faster to scan through.

Should I have suggested my usual PHP Builder normalisation tutorial instead, and then suggested a "how to use forms with PHP" tutorial instead of preparing to spoonfeed a code handout by first asking about the database schema?

dougal85

Just had a quick read through, as far as I can see you gave useful responses. The original post was by no means an easy read. I remember looking at it and I didn't think I understood enough to help.

Unfortunately there will always be somebody that's unreasonable and in-appreciative of your efforts to help.

rulian

I though your responce was quite reasonable and non threatening, so if the user took it as somehting else it's really out of your hands.

What beginners fail to realize is that they tell us about their level of inexeperience whether they know it or not just by how they describe their problem. how they focus of irrelevant matters or correlate things that arent related.

It justs looks to me a case of bad project management. If the project is mission critical they should not have given it to somebody who's experience wasnt sufficient. So now that person is stressing over it. That has nothign to do with code, but business practice.

But im my opinion, i think they are looking at an ajaxed form with simple foreign keys in the backend. Odds are they are not going to FIND such a thing built that they can just modify, but have to build from scratch. At that point a book suggestion is quite appropriate

Shrike

Honestly Laserlight, the author of that thread does not deserve a second thought. Getting help here is a privilege and not a right.

stolzyboy

Don't worry about it, there are far too many of these posters out there to worry about it.

You did nothing wrong. They expect the world for free and right then and there and for you to do it for them. They don't really want help.

NogDog

She/He has certainly done a poor job of encouraging anyone else to try and help him/her. :rolleyes:

laserlight

I see that Eline has not come back, so yeah, "They don't really want help."

Oh well.

leatherback

Aouch..! Wow, did you get flamed!

Don't worry about it. If she would have just gotten back to you with the intial statement that she has not control on the database, and the time limitation, then asked you for some more info it would all have been fine. She cut her own finger with thos posts.