[teddyh]

Oh, absolutely. If you give people an example (and you should), the overwhelming majority will copy the example exactly and then only change what they are forced to change when it doesn’t work otherwise. Therefore, prepare your examples accordingly.

[jmondi]

About 5 years ago I made a blog post detailing how to use Traefik/LE with PHP. For about one day, I realized I had my personal email in the template for the warning email for when the Lets Encrypt cert is expiring. I still get emails warning random people that their domain is going to expire.

Prepare your examples accordingly.

[Qwertious]

This sounds like a great way of getting some petty revenge while writing documentation.

[OkayPhysicist]

This also applies to code. I come across the situation A LOT in OOP codebases that they have completely superfluous interfaces and/or abstract classes, that are made pointless by the fact that every single implementation extends some example implementation. The most egregious example I ever found was a Minecraft mod which had an interface, implemented by an abstract class, which had another abstract class that extended it, which was implemented by a an example class.

Every single mod I could find (sample size of ~1000) just extended the example.

[bradley13]

This may be an actual answer to the problem. If you show "someprefix" as an example, then give users a helpful error message if they actually type in "someprefix". Something like "Dear user, someprefix is only an example, please replace this with a name appropriate to your business."

[teddyh]

No, you’ll only get “someprefix1”, and about 14 similar variants. What you need to do is either prepare a reasonable prefix valid for all (or at least most) users, or have the documentation to be dynamically prepared for each user, with a dynamically generated appropriate prefix for each user.

Alternatively, you’ll have to teach users what kinds of prefixes would be appropriate, with an example which is obviosly not appropriate for any of your actual user. This will take some length of text to explain, and many users will not read it, and may instead abandon your service.

Relatedly, I’ve always disliked when programs force me to name N number of things without adequately explaining

• What the names are (Is this some kind of group name? Instance name?)

• How the name will be shown. (Should I prefix the name with the company name myself, or will that always be visible? Will this name be shown together with numerous other names which are all UPPER CASE? Will the name be automatically converted to lower case?)

• If any of these names will be publicly visible.

• If any of the names can be changed later, and how hard it is.

• What characters are allowed (Are spaces, underscores, or dashes allowed? How about Unicode? Emojis? What is the normal naming scheme?)

• How long is the name allowed to be? (Will it be silently truncated at 8 or 16 characters (or grapheme clusters)?)