I've thought about this before.
Generally speaking, you only tell someone to use the "search" function when said person is asking a FAQ. However, this practice has become common in Off-Topic when someone creates a thread that we've already had in recent memory. This is, of course, the wrong thing to do. Newbies are curious folk, and we were all "there" at one point. Just play along.
Of course, it's when we have multiple topics in the first five or so pages (sadly, sometimes even on the same page)... that's when problems arise. This is why it's nice to remind newbies to thumb through a few pages at their leisure, but nothing as drastic as telling them to use the search function every time they want to start a new thread.
Plus, whining about the search feature promotes resurrection of old threads, which is almost always bad. So yeah. Good excuse to crack down on the misuse of the old "OMG USE TEH SAERCH!!1" thing.
Which I will be doing. Starting now.
|