I'm Done With The Biting Replies

Very wise

I like your avatar.

There: #2 post and it was a nice one.

Or Stampboards for that matter, they brag on 15k members yet only about 50 of them are active. Every newbie with a stamp is chased away from knowitalls who call their stamps rubbish, kiddie junk, ferret cage liners and the like. The Australian run board is also incredibly racist towards anyone not from a White majority 1st world country as I found out first hand.

If anyone acted like that here, I would expect a perma ban. Coins and stamps need new collectors and we should be welcoming them no matter how naive they are. Of course there will be time waters who keep starting a new thread for every common coin they have, but these are a minority.

My mother always said "If you can't say something nice, keep your mouth closed".

Unfortunately the last couple of comments are totally not in tune with the real purpose behind this topic to begin with.
let's not divert from the main purpose of this topic.
my suggestion has always been for those members who wish to insult or talk down to new members to be suspended on their first offense and then eliminated thereafter upon repeat.I think many members are done as well.

I cannot count the times that I have read a reply to a poster which made me think..."WHY did you have to answer THAT way?"
It just turns me off, and then I go on to another post.
No wonder our Forum Dad is at the end of his patience.

If "New members are the building blocks of this community..." then we who have been here a while have a responsibility to make them a part of the structure and not to toss them away.

Although I do not believe that I have ever been a "snarky, mean, or ... condescending jerk" I still feel somehow guilty. The jerks feel NOTHING but their own importance.

I clicked on this having misread your post title. I'm disappointed that I don't get to learn why you're sick of biting reptiles, but in my sorrow I can at least throw my support behind your sentiment.

very important and true:)

I agree; if you can't answer a question without demeaning or humiliating the person who is asking, it's best to just not reply.

Yes, I see a lot of very simplistic questions, and some very repetitive questions ("I think I found an error..." for a coin with obvious PMD, many times a day...). However, these are folks just getting started - they don't know! Have patience, help them out, educate them, and many will learn and grow. Give them a condescending answer, humiliate them, and some will walk away from the hobby before they really had a chance to get started.

On the flip side, I very occasionally see a newcomer argue with the advice they're given; say, when what they thought was a valuable error coin turned out to simply be a damaged coin worth face value. In those cases, there is no point in arguing - they only wanted validation and aren't really interested in learning, and arguing only brings you down to their level and in the end will do nothing to convince them.