Quote Originally Posted by ireland
Harry Kuhman obviously you know your stuff here, but im new so maybe you could lay off a bit. i might have over looked something but i value any support and the effort that is put into it, so please dont come attacking me.
A large and growing number of people post very similar questions to what you posted. Almost always it turns out that they have not searched the forums at all or even looked at recent posts before they ask the same questions over and over again. That's come to almost be expected around here, but we do like to point out the documentation section and the importance of searching the forums in the hope that it might give some lurker a little insight on how they can help themselves and get answers much faster than by repeating a question and waiting for an answer.

A much more frustrating issue is when we post an answer back to someone who didn't search and they just seem to ignore it. The md5 check seems to be the most common thing that people just ignore. The number of times it's been pointed out as important only to be ignored for days while a poster keeps asking the same questions amazes me. Why people seem to think "I don't know what that is therefor I should just ignore it and keep asking for help" is something I find hard to understand. In your case, James pointed you right to the downloading faq. We get these same questions day in and day out, so it's not unreasonable that he would have given you a link to the document with the right information in it rather than typing out that informatin as he did in his second post. It's reasonable to expect that when someone asked for assistance gives you a link that you will follow the link and read it. The MD5 sum is covered in the faq that the link pointed to, it's the third item.

Yes, I get frustrated and a bit gruff when I see the help that is given ignored. I actually started writing my previous post before James posted his second post, when he had only posted the ilink to the faq and you still asked if the file was bad or not. It was not intended as a personal attack, just something to stress that the importance of reading the faq pointed out was real, and to focus on the part of the faq that would resolve your problem. If it came across as a personal attack I appologize, but if you search these forums for md5 you'll find many many cases where the suggesting to check the md5 sum was made in less emphatic ways and was completely ignored. If you can provide any insight on any other way we can inform people of the importance of this simple step, or explain why people like yourself just ignore that step even when they are trying to determine if their file is corrupt or not, please share it with us. That would be extremely helpful.

If I had known that James was already getting back to you when I wrote my post I would have just stayed out of this. Understanding Underscore's second post was not yet on the forum when I wrote my post, what do you feel would have been the more productive way to help guide you or anyone along? Just ignore you completely? Post the same link that James did? Make the same statement about checking the md5 sum that I have come to learn by past experience will be ignored? I'm certainly not beyond improvement, but the only thing I've found so far that seems to get someone's attention is a post like I made above. If you know a btter way, tell me. Or even better, lead by example and help some other people here with burning issues once you resolve it for yourself.