I don’t get your point, Vince ... what could be your idea? Anonymous posts are as annoying as they can get, but I guess it is up to everyone here to decide if they want to answer or not ...

you look at ’new’ and it’s about 5 ’what font is this’ boring as hell and if it keeps up it will be the death of typophile just like comp.fonts or other older places that had professionals sharing ideas but it turned into idiots pirates sharing fonts.

Historically, some people have had a problem with type-IDs.
Personally I don’t care much for them (although they have
sometimes diverged into interesting discussions) but really,
there are bigger things to complain about.

hhp

Vince, if a stranger stopped you on the street to ask for directions to someplace you knew was just around the corner, would you advise them to get a map?

As someone who sometimes helps people identify fonts here, I’d like to make a few observations.

Identifying fonts is not an easy thing, and it gets harder every day, given the continual growth of the font universe. It’s easy to say “go look it up yourself,” but that can easily take hours if the font is not common or doesn’t happen to be in the particular font catalogs you happen to have, with no guarantee you will find what you are looking for. Many of the people who come here have said they have already tried to do it themselves and failed. I have several dozen specimen books, from around 1900 to the present, and even I am unable to identify a font sometimes, even with all these resources at hand. The typical designer may have a couple of font catalogs around. Most designers I know can identify common fonts on sight, but beyond that, they just shrug. As for non-designers, I think a service like this is rather a consciousness raising experience for them.

The main problem is that fonts cannot be easily and unambiguously categorized. Many systems have been devised, but none are as reliable or complete as, say, a dictionary or a thesaurus. When someone is looking at a font, they may not even have a good idea where to start looking. You have examples like the FontShop catalog in which a script font might be found under “Script” or “Display” for no obvious reason. And when you have hundreds of fonts listed alphabetically under one category, make sure you’ve had your morning coffee. Finding fonts in font catalogs is m