>>>>Consider these things, Al. Even here on a technical forum, complacency and laziness can enter in. I see a lot of posts with a comment like, "I wrote a paper about that fifteen years ago... go read it here," rather than reaching out a true hand of a solution a person can receive and use. We need more people giving people that true hand of a solution rather than just a nudge in the right direction.
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>>>You think that's laziness. I see it as offering a person documentation that was carefully crafted and edited and can go into a topic in much greater depth than I'm likely to do in a single forum post. I've spent 30 years writing about Fox. I've chosen to share much of it with the public for free and you call it laziness. Wow!
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>>I see it as having put in lots of labor and worked with and for people over many years, and then in the later years referring back to your prior labor without contributing much new labor. And while your prior work assists people, and the documentation that's there is a legacy standard that can be referred to, it's definitely a more static, cold, unconnected, impersonal reply than would be a link to the code, and a working example, or a partial framework of a working example.
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>What you're missing is how many of those were written after answering the same question or questions over and over again. When I see the same question again, why wouldn't I refer someone to the answer I've already written. There's a reason we have a Wiki in this community, and that StackOverflow is carefully designed to make it easy to find working answers.
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>>This is not a big issue for me, but something I've noted when I've seen various posts only referring back to prior existing work, and especially so when it's in written form (like a website or PDF).
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>Are you suggesting that videos are more valuable than text? Certainly not the case for me. Video tech answers are a waste of my time, unless we're taking about things like taking hardware apart. With text, I can easily home in on the portion I need.
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>Tamar

Personally I've no problem with getting a link to a previously-written work -- especially if it ends up pointing me toward the right direction or clearer understanding of some topic. And even if it doesn't answer the question -- it's still useful to me if the article or paper in question provides me with new information about something.