Quote Originally Posted by another view
I guess it depends on who the target audience of the article is. "Us photographers" have a pretty good idea what you can and can't do to equipment - some of mine looks prettier than others but all works like new.

Non-photographers who own cameras (people who get a roll of film developed that starts with Christmas, goes thru the summer and ends with the next Christmas!) sometimes don't understand these ideas. I've seen many P&S cameras with fingerprints on their lenses, but looked like new. There was a point that we all had to learn this stuff...
I would suggest, however, that beginners need even more carefully stated advice than we do. Some things in this post were needlessly exaggerated and others were just out and out wrong. Experts will see the problems, beginners won't. Other posts of this ilk have been made in the past and all suffer from this problem of sound advice mixed in with old wives tales and new things that are just wrong.

The effort is good, the advice has to be better.