[serf]

>Yes. Those were not good days. In those days, every tech savvy person somehow automatically got the privilege to be rude to the less knowledgeable people. If a user came for help without doing sufficient homework, a project author or community would rudely ask the user to go RTFM.

Two things.

1) 'RTFM' isn't as rude as expecting to be hand-fed. That's the grace in the statement, it's meant to be used as a retort to the expectation that the person being asked the question even has the time to entertain the notion of training someone, given that the manual is available and ready for consumption.

It's (supposed) to speak to the laziness of the person asking the question.

Personally, I think a lot of 'RTFM's that got thrown around have historically lead to the person asking the original question to become a lot more knowledgable on the subject than had a simple answer. I know that I learned that way.

2) I don't have a lot of faith that the politeness that many CoCs enforce got rid of 'RTFM', it just shifted it to "Hi User! Have you tried scouring our extensive question-base for that frequently asked question?" , and that kind of unnecessary glad-handed wordiness irks me as an individual.

[pacala]

In historical context, RTFM was often times unhelpful.

* The manual was accessible via a set of arcane commands, if it was at all accessible. Poor usability and lack of good search was common. Remembering the incantations required for accessing the manual was a task in itself, which left very little brain space for the actual task.

* The manual was usually a mere list of API calls, with little in the way of big picture explanations, usage examples or tutorials. There was no widespread internet content and search to supplant the paucity of the manual.

* The person asking the question had a task accomplished by combining several parts in the manual. RTFM translated to: read the equivalent of 200 print pages, filter out the 197 pages irrelevant to your task, but keep enough of them to grok the big picture, then aggregate the remaining 3 into a working incantation. And better get it right, or else a stream of cryptic and undocumented errors will come your way.

My suspicion is that RTFM wielding persons often times didn't know on top of their heads how to solve the task either, and were too caught up in protecting their expert status image to admit so. RTFM, you lazy intellectually challenged person vs. I dunno, try RTM.

[root_axis]

An effective CoC simply outlines a community definition for abuse. The use of "glad-handed wordiness" is unnecessary, a simple "please read the docs" would likely suffice.

[test1235]

I think the bottom line is that 'RTFM' is not a professional way to reply to anything. There's no need for a "retort" when a stranger is asking a technical question - it's not like it's personal or anything.

[luckylion]

I completely disagree. Yes, you can word it less directly by saying "Please Read the Manual", but there's really no better answer to a low-effort "do my work for me" question. Those have become more and more common, just putting the question title into Google often serves up another question that solves that exact problem, but people don't even bother using a search engine - they go directly to asking others to do the thinking for them, then complain when they are given a solution that they can't just plug into the client project they are working on.