whining warning in effect, so if you don't like negativity 
please don't read the rest.
[spoiler]
Does it bother you when someone asks a question and you think that you have an answer or a hint and the person doesn't at least acknowledge your reply?
Happens all the time on forums and it seams that this place is not different.
A good answer would be
"If you're p***ed off with no reply to your reply, just don't reply"
[/spoiler]
I'm still waiting to see if the guy on the hardware->troublesh**ting board has made his motor run fast enough or not, with my suggestion. How long should your attention span be on one particular post/thing online? Seriously, I don't know the answer to this.
Yeah, it is irritating...
Last time I did it was when someone needed help turning pins hign and low without delay... So I tried to help, and actually ended up doing the entire thing for him...
http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1288016644/16#16
Maybe we should create some sort of credit system so that if help is not acknowledged the helper can put a 0 star on the requestor.
To what end? Those posters disappear never to be seen again anyway.
Korman
I figure it's Karma credits. shrug Besides I like to help because it helps me learn new things and gets my brain working.
`Maybe we should create some sort of credit system so that if help is not acknowledged the helper can put a 0 star on the requestor.
I like that idea. Why not have a "rate a member" kind of system? On forums, stars are usually associated with the amount of posts, why not associate it from ratings given by other users?
Ok, the idea of seeing "Guyt" rated one star and a half is not too much fun, but what the heck, I'm allready rated on "RateMyteacher.ca" and I have learned to live with it
My biggest peeve is writing a response, posting it, only to have the OP delete their question; it makes you feel (and possibly look like to others in the future) like you are talking to the wind or something.
Why not have a "rate a member" kind of system?
"Reputation management."
I believe that this sort of thing has been experimented with in forums (rate the questioners, rate the responders, etc.) It doesn't seem to have caught on much; I think it's too easy to "game" such a system. Eventually you end up with people like politicians, who spend all their time maintaining their reputation, but not actually doing anything 
(For some questions, it's an attempt to get their homework done for them, and a late answer is considered no better than no answer at all. Sigh.)
I was a co-admin on a forum and we added "Mojo" to the site with a hack. A script ran every night that chose 100 members at random who have been active in the past 30 days and gave each person 5 mojo points. They could spend mojo on any post they wanted. (not their own). If any post got 3 or more up mojo's it turned green and stood out in the thread. If a post got 3 or more negative mojo's it got squashed. At midnight all unused mojo was cleared and new members were chosen.
Moderators got 25 points and admins got unlimited. This allowed us to make certain posts stand out (turn green) if we felt they were really good.
It worked pretty well actually and we collected some good data on our members. You could really see who the popular ones were and who were the "trouble makers".
Eventually we upgraded the site and the hack went away.
Besides I like to help because it helps me learn new things and gets my brain working.
Biocow,
This is also my main motivation: many question that come up make me wonder whether my understanding of things is correct and more than once made me check how things really work to find out, I had no clue. More often than not, answering a question saves me from encountering the same problem.
Korman
Eventually you end up with people like politicians, who spend all their time maintaining their reputation, but not actually doing anything
Well, you don't live where I live, because home, our politicians are actually doing nothing to maintain their reputation
Well....
I've noticed that, more times than I am comfortable with, replies can be arrogant, condescending, intimidating, or argumentative.
Given that most requests for help are from people new to the game, why would such an attitude be acknowledged?
That said, I do thank those who take the time to constructively help others, myself included.
That's my whine over!
The thing that irks me the most is, the (online) community I call home is praised for things like friendliness, that it supplies plenty of (constructive) critique, but also praise where praise is due. Most of these things feel natural and normal to me, so irk me a lot here.. in particular when people post in a hostile fashion that the original poster should provide more details because we can't geuss what they want. While this is quite easy to figure out when you think about it, when I code.. and I'm stuck.. I oversee a lot of things, so I can definitly see how someone could withhold a lot of critical information when posting a question, simply because of the frustration of not being able to figure it out.
Though I have to side a bit with crosh. Deleting the post entirely when people try to answer.. makes it annoying and harder to search for those topics. It degrades the knowledgebase more than just some stray posts :-/
Put me into the arrogant camp. But why is this the case? When questions come in the form of: Pls hlp me connct motors!!! One starts to wonder, what the original poster is willing to contribute. No, he didn't look at the tutorials, no he didn't look in the forums for similar problems of which there are many, no he didn't even look on the internet for solutions to realise there's more than one type of motor which may be relevant for his question. All he does is to come here and expect to get help, very often in the form of a finished product. And this attitude's something I don't like, so from me he'll probably get a sarcastic or caustic answer which points him in the right direction. That's my hobby and contributation to make the world a better place.
Also you'll notice, that people who ask nicely in a reasonable manner get this treatment very rarely. There must be link between those unrelated observations, I think.
Korman
Just got and idea, that could be easy (and fun) to implement, if I can find how to trap to all keys before they are treated by windows).
Before replying to the guy, you select his nick, press a hot key, a little window appears with the following info:
Nick in database: YES (if no, possibility to add)
On black list: NO (may be toggled)
From there, you decide if you anwser or not.
So far, this morning I replied to 5 persons. Took me 3 hours. It's not that I know everything, it is just that when you have been teaching embedded systems programming for 25 years, you know a few things that could be helpful. And your job developed this bad habit of answering questions.
Can't wait to see how much feedback I will get from these guys. I would not be surprised if 4 out of 5 would go on my "Blacklist Manager"
Korman, any idea on how to trap all keys from keyboard? Thanks in advance!
Put me into the arrogant camp.
Well, OK if you want me too, but it's not something I would be proud of.
One starts to wonder
Precisely. You make unwarranted assumptions.
Also you'll notice, that people who ask nicely in a reasonable manner get this treatment very rarely. There must be link between those unrelated observations, I think.
Its not that rare. The following from a post only today.
The OP said
Im looking for a bit [of] help.
What did he get back?
As a new user, you can hardly already have an issue with the IDE that the Arduino team provides.
I'm not trying to point the finger at this particular responder, but choose your own adjective.
I feel what Korman feels. As a teacher myself, I don't just answer questions, I train my students how to ask a question that will be more helpful to both parties. I tend to treat kind and prepared help seekers better than those unprepared or unwilling to invest the least amount of time to ask a question.
I might be unfriendly sometimes to somebody but I think creating an environment where everyone knows how to properly ask for help is just as important as creating an environment where everyone is ready to help others. Allowing too many crappy requests discourages helpers.
What we're talking about here is thanks, appreciation, and all of us are normal to want it.
However, we really have little control over it – we do a good deed and whether the other person thanks us is up to him or her.
But we do have some control over how we choose to feel about it.
In a personal relationship, if you're never appreciated, it's serious business. You have to communicate and work at it to get it, or give up and suffer, or walk away from the relationship.
On a forum such as this, when you aren't thanked -- for your own good – you simply have to zen out. You're not going to change the guy, and to whine about it usually means that you just feel bad about it for a longer period of time. So the guy's a jerk, a taker, and it's best for us to just forget about it. Life's too short to feel angry for one second more than you have to.
But...But...is not that I don't acknowledge your reply.
It's only awaiting Moderation!
http://www.thinkgeek.com/images/products/zoom/e362_comment_moderation.jpg
No, but yeah...people helped me countless of time and I can't always tell them how much I thank them. I'm always totally acknowledging any small or big help, but I don't always tell my helper. I think it's the same for everyone.