soul-mine :I'm sorry! Let's start over. I guess I'm not entirely clear on what you're having trouble with now. So maybe you could summarize your current situation and what's not working, and I could try to help you with that? Sorry if I'm asking you to repeat yourself, but the thread seems to have gotten a little confused... I just figure that if you restate what you said earlier it'll clarify things and make me feel less dumb.
next_ghost :I know you and I don't totally agree on whether and how we should encourage newbie-server-operators, but we've already talked about that, so I won't beat a dead horse.
Anyway, your comment about the executable/qvm mismatch was somewhat enlightening to me, so thanks!
sleekslacker : You said
Please, just play on other servers. You're not knowledgeable enough to run your own server. It requires more than what you know now.
Do me a favor. Envision a world in which people ONLY try to do things they ALREADY KNOW HOW TO DO. We would all be crawling, drooling imbeciles, because no one would have learned to walk, talk, or read, let alone cook food, make music, or use computers. Actually, we would probably all be dead.
If you recommend to someone that they not try to do something because they don't already know how to do it, you're basically suggesting that no one should ever learn anything new. Because the ONLY way to learn -- in fact, the definition of "learning" -- is to pick something that "
requires more than what you know now", and work to FIGURE IT OUT until you DO know enough.
Sometimes you can figure it out on your own, and sometimes you need help. To get help, it's generally considered reasonable to (politely) ask more experienced people if they will teach you what they know, enabling you to learn more quickly. Did you know that there are people in the world who actually teach for a living? Yeah! We call them "teachers", and the people who learn are called "students". There are even organized locations where "students" can go ask questions of "teachers"! We call those "schools"! Amazing!
It's like we actually think this process of "learning" is IMPORTANT or something.
But here in the open-source community, and the online gaming community, we don't have "schools", and we don't have full-time "teachers". What we DO have are "volunteers". That would be people who know more -- like you and me -- who enjoy answering questions from people who know less.
Oops- I lie. I said "like you and me", but apparently that should just be "like me", because you've decided you don't like answering questions any more.
Which is fine; no one's forcing you, and as a volunteer all of your time is precious. I don't object to that at all. What I object to is telling people to not even bother learning because they obviously don't know enough. In my experience, the
best time and place to learn is when you obviously don't know enough. That is when people
should be asking questions.
Sleekslacker, once upon a time, you didn't know very much. And you tried to do things you didn't understand. Maybe someone told you not to bother. Maybe you were lucky and no one told you anything. Or maybe you were REALLY lucky and someone helped you out. Well, Sleekslacker, some day in the future, I
guarantee that you will
once again want to learn something you don't understand. You will be frustrated. You will be desperate. You will beat your head against the wall. You will ask someone for help.
And they will say:
"Please, just go play. You're not knowledgeable enough, it requires more than what you know now. You want what you can barely achieve. And from my experience, you don't understand it.
I think I've said enough.
No offence."
