As you have all noticed, from time to time I like to post some advice to help us all keep this a community-friendly site. 

As far as I know, few people have purposely insulted or hurt the feelings of someone who doesn't know how to do something.  On the contrary, members of the website have generally tried to be friendly and provide helpful and positive results.

What I have noticed on occasion, however, is showing surprise.  Like "I'm surprised you didn't know that."  For example, I was asking for help on a Ti-Basic program, and the problem was I had a memory leak.  The person who helped me said "I'm surprised you didn't know that with all your ASM knowledge."  Well, yeah, just because I know a lot of ASM doesn't mean I'm advanced in Ti-Basic programming.

Whether we intend it or not, a remark of surprise can hurt someones feelings.  I, for one, felt hurt because it was like "You know all this, and yet you don't know something this simple?"  The person who helped me didn't mean it that way, but I felt stupid.

I think it's only calc84maniac who knows each and everything about his area of expertise (a little joke, of course )  So it will help if we remember that people good at some things will not be good at everything.  If we avoid displaying surprise, people will feel better about themselves.

Yeah I ranted quite a few times about that. I hate it especially when someone says he never heard of a band song and others belittle him because of it. Fortunately this doesn't happen much here, but I noticed it happened slightly more often lately.

We need to remember that everyone gotta start somewhere and in the case of not having heard of a band, for example, not everyone got the same tastes, so they discover some bands much later than other people.

EDIT: My rant about this was actually on United-TI in 2007, back when everyone started doing this in the community. I even started banning people who did it on Omni, back then. http://www.unitedti.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=7203&st=0&p=113586&fromsearch=1&#entry113586

I must say this is 100x worse IRL and in online games, though. Good luck asking help in a Starcraft chatroom about strategies. (except when Blizzard does a giant tri or quadrimonthly wave of banning)

For example, saying "I'm surprised you made this topic." Is a good way to demonstrate... wait, no, I really am surprised.  In fact, I'm surprised this is actually even a problem.

I guess the basic rule is, to always think over what you are going to say.