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Cartoon artwork created with Stripgenerator; dialogue copy/pasted from #ubuntu-offtopic on Freenode.
Jul
27
topyli’s law and topyli’s second law
Tagged with community, design, law, life, support | 4 Comments
On technical IRC channels, mailing lists, Usenet groups (remember those?) and Web forums, you often learn a lot of interesting and useful stuff. If you hang in there for long enough, you’re going to learn some more universal truths as well. I have learned a couple of things that I think i may have tweeted about some time or another, but would like to document here too, for future application.
topyli’s law:
When a user asks for help on a problem (s)he is having with $PROGRAM, another user will immediately suggest they switch to $ANOTHER_PROGRAM and use that instead.
topyli’s second law:
When you add an “Advanced” button or tab in the configuration dialog for your $USER_INTERFACE, all your users immediately become advanced.
The second law is actually a special case of mahen23′s law, which I learned on #ubuntu-offtopic. Here it is:
If you create a button, people will press it.