0979: "Wisdom of the Ancients"

[vortighast]

Alt Text: "All long help threads should have a sticky globally-editable post at the top saying 'DEAR PEOPLE FROM THE FUTURE: Here's what we've figured out so far ...'"

Happens to me all the time. Glad I'm not the only one.

[davidhbrown]

And you know there's going to be some holier-than-thou monitoring that board just for the chance to complain if you reopen the old thread... even though it's the only thread anywhere in the 'net about it so why start another one?

[ryan7113]

DEAR PEOPLE OF THE FUTURE: This thread is going to become way too long to read in one sitting. Don't even try.

[alanh]

There's one thing worse: a single followup reading just

Never mind, I figured it out.

[Rocco]

Today marks the 6th day during which I've spent all of my free time troubleshooting a mysterious and debilitating bug in the PC version of Skyrim that totally crashes my computer and forces a hard restart. It took a whole day of this before finding a small thread (that has become a large thread) of people with similar problems.

tl;dr GOOMHR

[jdmulloy]

It's even worse when all the replies are just people saying "me too".

The absolute worst thing however is when the OP just says that they've fixed it and disappears.

[Megaryuu]

Wow Randall, after years of reading xkcd this is the first "get out of my head" moment.

I have a programming assignment due Monday where I have to create a WPF TreeView based on an XML file. But I keep getting the error "Element already has a logical parent. It must be detached from the old parent before it is attached to a new one."

Googling isn't helping much.

Perhaps when I figure it out I will edit my post here so that future people will know what was wrong.

[Quicksilver]

I can totally relate to this.

[scottyb]

As of 11:12PM US CDST a Google search for "DenverCoder9" returns no results.

[glasnt]

My boss just yelled "IT'S CALLED STACK EXCHANGE"

..

He has 30 times more rep than me on there


edit: You know what's worse? Googling an error message/ID, only to have 0 hits. O_O

[ubel]

Oh how true this rings for me, and it looks like so many of us... Bugs in third party libraries/applications I am trying to fix that have been sitting on these forums, unanswered for years and years. The madness!

Then again... this is the exact reason I have grown to love stack overflow (the Q&A website). I have learned so much from the community there, it is such an amazing wealth of knowledge... Most of my programming questions that I google I just add on site:stackoverflow.com to the end haha.

[arcticfox.sq]

This has happened to me so many times it's not even funny.

[RyanW]

Oh. My. God. YES!!!!

That was the closest I'd ever come to doing what the stick guy is doing in this comic.

[Jorpho]

Verily, this strip made me laugh louder than any other one recently.

It has a nasty habit of happening with questions in obscure video games, too.

[jpk]

Yep.

[suso]

So true. Several times the answer I was looking for or at least clues where in another language. At least now there is Google Translate. Sometimes in the past I'd go onto IRC and ask if someone could translate if I was really desperate.

What pisses me off now is that its 2011 and there are still new service websites not putting dates or useful dates on things. How hard is it to put dates on things? In fact, create/modify dates should be required for every single webpage on the net. Not that this post is going to fix this problem, its just lazy ass brain dead programmers doing it. Another problem that is coming up now is that there are so many old tech posts that sometimes you get overwhelmed with irrelevant information and can't find something recent.

[Ronfar]

If that text on the left-hand side isn't a poem, it should be.

[bhoot]

My god. I always have the urge to want to talk to the person who posted the problem and ask them what they found. It is a real connection.

[Sprocket]

I do love really old posts from threads of any kind....occasionally I'll even find things from the 90s.

[Waldo]

Except when there's only one reply and it's "never mind solved the problem guys." Then fuck you, you unhelpful ancient jerk...

[DenverCoder9]

I have this problem a lot. Anyone know how to fix it?

[dmeranda]

What's even worse is to discover that that old lonely post was actually made by myself, many many years ago, and I forgot all about it. And no one had ever noticed.

[whateveries]

but 2003 was only. it. oh.

next step is to search for people who were writing code back in 2003 filter the result by the Denver Telephone books circa 2003/ filter out people who are not working in the field you are interested in and stalk the remaining people until they divulge who denvercoder9 was. someone will know. (and then you find out DenverCoder9 died in mysterious circumstances surrounding his persistant inquiries into the error code...THE ERROR CODE OF DOOM...)

[jpk]

If that text on the left-hand side isn't a poem, it should be.

Depending on what you mean by "poem", either it is or it isn't. Should doesn't enter into it.

For me, a poem is metrical and rhymed, so this isn't one. But if you want it to be a poem, I don't mind.

[vibrunazo]

As of 11:12PM US CDST a Google search for "DenverCoder9" returns no results.

As of 4:00 AM GMT -3 November 18 of 2011, a Google search for "DenverCoder9" returns YOU.

[DenverCoder9]

I have this problem a lot. Anyone know how to fix it?

Never mind, I figured it out.

[Djehutynakht]

Oh god, yes. Yes. Exactly.

There are no words necessary. For we all know this.

The wisdom of the ancients... shall it be lost forever.

Time to open the field of internet-archaeology.

[ThemePark]

There's one thing worse: a single followup reading just

Never mind, I figured it out.

This. I logged on just to post this. This is the single most annoying thing in the history of the Internet.

Someone should make a forum where you can ask computer questions, but where posting "Nevermind, I fixed it" is not only punishable by being banned for all eternity, but also causes a SWAT team kicking in the poster's door.

And you will be spammed with emails daily until you either post EXACTLY what solved the problem OR marked it as unsolved.

[shagbark]

What's worse is when you have the answer,
or you have a variant of the problem for which the answer doesn't work,
and you can't post it because the thread is closed.

There is NEVER ANY REASON to close a forum thread.
The point of having a forum, instead of a Facebook page,
is so people can organize their discussions by topic rather than by date.

If a topic is not worth discussing anymore after six months,
it wasn't worth discussing in the first place.

[TV4Fun]

Equally annoying: when your first several hits are all people with the same exact problem, and the responses are all of the form

This question has been answered before. Search the forum before posting.

[Linux0s]

Definitely been there done that. And it's not really "Wisdom of the Ancients"... it's more like "Mystery for all Eternity".

[dysprog]

Whats worse it when there is a complete solution for ALMOST the same problem.

"I already tried that, this is something different. IT'S NOT THE FROBNICATOR"

Or when EVERYONE had a similar problem 3 versions ago.

For chistsakes, upgrade to version 2

I'M USING VERSION 5!!

If it's either of those, good luck getting help. Your posts will be deleted as duplicates. Helpful idiots will pile on with wrong solutions. Google will get you the same wrong answer again and again.

[alanh]

I just realized how old this problem is.

Hey, how do you prove that no three positive integers a, b, and c can satisfy the equation a^n + b^n = c^n for any integer value of n greater than two?

Never mind, I figured it out

[Aster Selene]

oh my god I have this problem all the time

I literally just had this problem every day for the past week from two days ago.

It was regarding weird stuff happening in my Pokemon game...

I had to go 15 pages into Google and eventually found something that was vaguely like the solution I eventually found (a combination of fragments brought together from over the internet) but damn is it aggravating.

I just realized how old this problem is.

Hey, how do you prove that no three positive integers a, b, and c can satisfy the equation a^n + b^n = c^n for any integer value of n greater than two?

Never mind, I figured it out

"I figured it out, but the answer's too brilliant and long to post here. Good luck with your lives!"

[lollerskates]

Cue massive nick rename to DenverCoder9 on stackoverflow

[Wooloomooloo]

Yeah, the only answers being a bunch of "clear the browser cache / restart the computer / get the latest drivers and you computer definitely won't catch fire the next time" certainly doesn't lighten one's mood when having this kind of problem. Actually, this sort of (no answers) result does have a useful purpose - after finding 2-3, I know there's no point in searching further and I'm well and truly f***ed.

Also, riding on the tail of this problem comes the Huggins uncertainty problem - If I magically do manage to stumble upon the solution all by myself, should I try to be helpful and post it on that old 2003 thread (and be blasted as a troll for reopening it) or just avoid the fuss and move on quietly...?

Oh, and my favorite kind of forum post dating is the "March 13" type (even if it's clear the thread must be dated 2003-ish). Obviously, on some parts of the internet, there is only the one year. EVER.

[diegzumillo]

lol Happens often with me.

There was this one time where I actually knew the guy who posted the question! and I also knew he still didn't have the answer. Because it was me The funny thing is that I didn't realized at first, so I was reading really interested "this guy has the exact same questions I have! and some great intelligent insights too. Also, that is a very handsome avatar there.."

[dsirijus]

Nope.

What's freaky is to find one single lonely thread on internet on exactly your issue, 3 years old, solved correctly by yourself and you have no recollection of that whatsoever.

Happened to me, was some SmartFox Server issue...

[JustDoug]

There's one thing worse: a single followup reading just

Never mind, I figured it out.

Worse yet: "I have discovered a truly remarkable solution which this textbox is too small to contain."

[nixiebunny]

I work on hardware on a radio telescope. I was looking for the user manual to a servo motor driver board one day with Google. The search of the board's part number gave, as the first hit, our telescope's website.

Not the manufacturer's website, OUR website.

I realized that it was hopeless and installed a different brand of servo driver board.