Gregory's Server
> If you remove the "don't forget to change the IP" entirely then you're just tripping up a different set of people.
Didn't say that. I said that it should ideally be made as clear as possible from the command itself, you yourself give many of such examples. But it's friggin' hard and I had people literally run commands with placeholders 1:1 despite everything you described. And not too few.
Maybe I'm burnt because I taught freshmen CompSci, most of them having never opened the command line a week before. But I always try to assume the least competent user – which means, assume that they do not *know* that RFC and they do not look at surrounding hints.
@ljrk I think the freshmen CompSci may be the reason indeed. Considering that school, university, most sorts of academics in general will encourage or even require skimming texts. When people from that background arrive in tech and see actual good documentation it's probably the firnt time they read a text that's written to be read for information, not written to comply with academic standards.
I get that we shouldn't make participation hard for people, but in that one instance I think it's arguably okay to do something to get that (IMHO toxic) mindset out of their heads.
Most people I know and have known are from a non-academic background and the majority of thes still tries to cut through docs but ultimately reads the important bits. It's more a habit of trying to skip chapters than parts of a sentence. And skipping in introduction may be much less problematic than skipping the half of the sentence that digs into the actual matter.
However overall I still don't think some inadvertent issue like making networks unusable or breaking your local connectivity by accident (something detecting public IPs and disabling a port or whatever) is worth the (presumably small) margin of people who will notice the funky looking address.
But at this point I'd have to agree, I am repeating myself, so I won't reiterate :blobCat_wink_tongue_out:
@ljrk I think the freshmen CompSci may be the reason indeed. Considering that school, university, most sorts of academics in general will encourage or even require skimming texts. When people from that background arrive in tech and see actual good documentation it's probably the firnt time they read a text that's written to be read for information, not written to comply with academic standards.