bAdWaYz
August 11th, 2004, 11:40 PM
I am posting this not to bash anyone or point a finger at any one person here. In fact its more of a suggestion for some who might not know any better. You see the mod's here and other that try to help with tech support spend alot of time reading questions. They do this for free and as a huge help to them it would be nice to have questions worded in such a way that it is clear whats being asked. A clear question and well thought out question is more likely to get an answer than one thats so hard to read it takes 15 min to work out what is being asked. With that in mind here are a few suggestions on how to ask a question......
Before asking a technical question by email, or in a newsgroup, or on a website chat board, do the following:
Try to find an answer by searching the Web.
Try to find an answer by reading the manual.
Try to find an answer by reading a FAQ.
Try to find an answer by inspection or experimentation.
Try to find an answer by asking a skilled friend.
If you are a programmer, try to find an answer by reading the source code.
When you ask your question, display the fact that you have done these things first; this will help establish that you're not being a lazy sponge and wasting people's time. Better yet, display what you have learned from doing these things. We like answering questions for people who have demonstrated that they can learn from the answers.
Use tactics like doing a Google search on the text of whatever error message you get (and search Google groups as well as web pages). This might well take you straight to fix documentation or a mailing list thread that will answer your question. Even if it doesn't, saying “I googled on the following phrase but didn't get anything that looked useful” is a good thing to be able to put in email or news postings requesting help.
Prepare your question. Think it through. Hasty-sounding questions get hasty answers, or none at all. The more you do to demonstrate that you have put thought and effort into solving your problem before asking for help, the more likely you are to actually get help.
Beware of asking the wrong question. If you ask one that is based on faulty assumptions, J. Random Hacker is quite likely to reply with a uselessly literal answer while thinking “Stupid question...”, and hoping that the experience of getting what you asked for rather than what you needed will teach you a lesson.
Never assume you are entitled to an answer. You are not; you aren't, after all, paying for the service. You will earn an answer, if you earn it, by asking a question that is substantial, interesting, and thought-provoking — one that implicitly contributes to the experience of the community rather than merely passively demanding knowledge from others.
On the other hand, making it clear that you are able and willing to help in the process of developing the solution is a very good start. “Would someone provide a pointer?”, “What is my example missing?” and “What site should I have checked?” are more likely to get answered than “Please post the exact procedure I should use.” because you're making it clear that you're truly willing to complete the process if someone can simply point you in the right direction.
When You Ask
Choose your forum carefully
Be sensitive in choosing where you ask your question. You are likely to be ignored, or written off as a loser, if you:
post your question to a forum where it is off topic
post a very elementary question to a forum where advanced technical questions are expected, or vice-versa
cross-post to too many different newsgroups
post a personal email to somebody who is neither an acquaintance of yours nor personally responsible for solving your problem
Hackers blow off questions that are inappropriately targeted in order to try to protect their communications channels from being drowned in irrelevance. You don't want this to happen to you.
The first step, therefore, is to find the right forum. Again, Google and other web-searching methods are your friend. Use them to find the project web page most closely associated with the hardware or software that is giving you difficulties. Usually it will have links to a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) list, and to project mailing lists and their archives. These mailing lists are the final places to go for help, if your own efforts (including reading those FAQs you found) do not find you a solution.
But shooting off an email to a person or forum which you are not familiar with is risky at best. For example, do not assume that the author of an informative web page wants to be your free consultant. Do not make optimistic guesses about whether your question will be welcome — if you are unsure, send it elsewhere, or refrain from sending it at all.
When selecting a Web forum, newsgroup or mailing list, don't trust the name by itself too far; look for a FAQ or charter to verify that your question is on-topic. Read some of the back traffic before posting so you'll get a feel for how things are done there. In fact, it's a very good idea to do a keyword search for words relating to your problem on the newsgroup or mailing list archives before you post. It may find you an answer, and if not it will help you formulate a better question.
Know what your topic is! One of the classic mistakes is asking questions about the Unix or Windows programming interface in a forum devoted to a language or library or tool that is portable across both. If you don't understand why this is a blunder, you'd be best off not asking any questions at all until you get it.
In general, questions to a well-selected public forum are more likely to get useful answers than equivalent questions to a private one. There are multiple reasons for this. One is simply the size of the pool of potential respondents. Another is the size of the audience; hackers would rather answer questions that educate a lot of people than questions which only serve a few.
Understandably, skilled hackers and authors of popular software are already receiving more than their fair share of mistargeted messages. By adding to the flood, you could in extreme cases even be the straw which breaks the camel's back — quite a few times, contributors to popular projects have withdrawn their support because the collateral damage in the form of useless email traffic to their personal accounts became unbearable.
Web and IRC forums directed towards newbies often give the quickest response
Your local user group, or your Linux distribution, may advertise a Web forum or IRC channel where newbies can get help. (In non-English-speaking countries newbie forums are still more likely to be mailing lists.) These are good first places, to ask, especially if you think you may have tripped over a relatively simple or common problem. An advertised IRC channel is an open invitation to ask questions there and often get answers in real time.
In fact, if you got the program that is giving you problems from a distro (as common today), it may be better to ask in the distro forum/list before trying the program's project forum/list. The project's hackers may just say, “use our build”.
Before posting to any Web forum, check if it has a Search feature. And if it does, try a couple of keyword searches for something like your problem; it just might help. If you did a general Web search before (as you should have), search the forum anyway; your web-wide search engine might not have all of this forum indexed recently.
There is an increasing tendency for projects to do user support over a Web forum or IRC channel, with email more reserved for development traffic. So look for those channels first when seeking project-specific help.
Be precise and informative about your problem
Describe the symptoms of your problem or bug carefully and clearly.
Describe the environment in which it occurs (machine, OS, application, whatever). Provide your vendor's distribution and release level (e.g.: “Fedora Core 1”, “Slackware 9.1”, etc.).
Describe the research you did to try and understand the problem before you asked the question.
Describe the diagnostic steps you took to try and pin down the problem yourself before you asked the question.
Describe any recent changes in your computer or software configuration that might be relevant.
Courtesy never hurts, and sometimes helps
Be courteous. Use “Please” and “Thanks for your attention” or “Thanks for your consideration”. Make it clear that you appreciate the time people spend helping you for free.
To be honest, this isn't as important as (and cannot substitute for) being grammatical, clear, precise and descriptive, avoiding proprietary formats etc.; hackers in general would rather get somewhat brusque but technically sharp bug reports than polite vagueness. (If this puzzles you, remember that we value a question by what it teaches us.)
However, if you've got your technical ducks in a row, politeness does increase your chances of getting a useful answer.
(We must note that the only serious objection we have received from veteran tech support to this HOWTO is with respect to our previous recommendation to use “Thanks in advance”. Some tech support teams feel this connotes an intention not to thank anybody afterwards. Our recommendation is to either say “Thanks in advance” first and thank respondents afterwards, or express courtesy in a different way, such as by saying “Thanks for your attention” or “Thanks for your consideration”.)
ok I'm off my soapbox now sorry about that
Before asking a technical question by email, or in a newsgroup, or on a website chat board, do the following:
Try to find an answer by searching the Web.
Try to find an answer by reading the manual.
Try to find an answer by reading a FAQ.
Try to find an answer by inspection or experimentation.
Try to find an answer by asking a skilled friend.
If you are a programmer, try to find an answer by reading the source code.
When you ask your question, display the fact that you have done these things first; this will help establish that you're not being a lazy sponge and wasting people's time. Better yet, display what you have learned from doing these things. We like answering questions for people who have demonstrated that they can learn from the answers.
Use tactics like doing a Google search on the text of whatever error message you get (and search Google groups as well as web pages). This might well take you straight to fix documentation or a mailing list thread that will answer your question. Even if it doesn't, saying “I googled on the following phrase but didn't get anything that looked useful” is a good thing to be able to put in email or news postings requesting help.
Prepare your question. Think it through. Hasty-sounding questions get hasty answers, or none at all. The more you do to demonstrate that you have put thought and effort into solving your problem before asking for help, the more likely you are to actually get help.
Beware of asking the wrong question. If you ask one that is based on faulty assumptions, J. Random Hacker is quite likely to reply with a uselessly literal answer while thinking “Stupid question...”, and hoping that the experience of getting what you asked for rather than what you needed will teach you a lesson.
Never assume you are entitled to an answer. You are not; you aren't, after all, paying for the service. You will earn an answer, if you earn it, by asking a question that is substantial, interesting, and thought-provoking — one that implicitly contributes to the experience of the community rather than merely passively demanding knowledge from others.
On the other hand, making it clear that you are able and willing to help in the process of developing the solution is a very good start. “Would someone provide a pointer?”, “What is my example missing?” and “What site should I have checked?” are more likely to get answered than “Please post the exact procedure I should use.” because you're making it clear that you're truly willing to complete the process if someone can simply point you in the right direction.
When You Ask
Choose your forum carefully
Be sensitive in choosing where you ask your question. You are likely to be ignored, or written off as a loser, if you:
post your question to a forum where it is off topic
post a very elementary question to a forum where advanced technical questions are expected, or vice-versa
cross-post to too many different newsgroups
post a personal email to somebody who is neither an acquaintance of yours nor personally responsible for solving your problem
Hackers blow off questions that are inappropriately targeted in order to try to protect their communications channels from being drowned in irrelevance. You don't want this to happen to you.
The first step, therefore, is to find the right forum. Again, Google and other web-searching methods are your friend. Use them to find the project web page most closely associated with the hardware or software that is giving you difficulties. Usually it will have links to a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) list, and to project mailing lists and their archives. These mailing lists are the final places to go for help, if your own efforts (including reading those FAQs you found) do not find you a solution.
But shooting off an email to a person or forum which you are not familiar with is risky at best. For example, do not assume that the author of an informative web page wants to be your free consultant. Do not make optimistic guesses about whether your question will be welcome — if you are unsure, send it elsewhere, or refrain from sending it at all.
When selecting a Web forum, newsgroup or mailing list, don't trust the name by itself too far; look for a FAQ or charter to verify that your question is on-topic. Read some of the back traffic before posting so you'll get a feel for how things are done there. In fact, it's a very good idea to do a keyword search for words relating to your problem on the newsgroup or mailing list archives before you post. It may find you an answer, and if not it will help you formulate a better question.
Know what your topic is! One of the classic mistakes is asking questions about the Unix or Windows programming interface in a forum devoted to a language or library or tool that is portable across both. If you don't understand why this is a blunder, you'd be best off not asking any questions at all until you get it.
In general, questions to a well-selected public forum are more likely to get useful answers than equivalent questions to a private one. There are multiple reasons for this. One is simply the size of the pool of potential respondents. Another is the size of the audience; hackers would rather answer questions that educate a lot of people than questions which only serve a few.
Understandably, skilled hackers and authors of popular software are already receiving more than their fair share of mistargeted messages. By adding to the flood, you could in extreme cases even be the straw which breaks the camel's back — quite a few times, contributors to popular projects have withdrawn their support because the collateral damage in the form of useless email traffic to their personal accounts became unbearable.
Web and IRC forums directed towards newbies often give the quickest response
Your local user group, or your Linux distribution, may advertise a Web forum or IRC channel where newbies can get help. (In non-English-speaking countries newbie forums are still more likely to be mailing lists.) These are good first places, to ask, especially if you think you may have tripped over a relatively simple or common problem. An advertised IRC channel is an open invitation to ask questions there and often get answers in real time.
In fact, if you got the program that is giving you problems from a distro (as common today), it may be better to ask in the distro forum/list before trying the program's project forum/list. The project's hackers may just say, “use our build”.
Before posting to any Web forum, check if it has a Search feature. And if it does, try a couple of keyword searches for something like your problem; it just might help. If you did a general Web search before (as you should have), search the forum anyway; your web-wide search engine might not have all of this forum indexed recently.
There is an increasing tendency for projects to do user support over a Web forum or IRC channel, with email more reserved for development traffic. So look for those channels first when seeking project-specific help.
Be precise and informative about your problem
Describe the symptoms of your problem or bug carefully and clearly.
Describe the environment in which it occurs (machine, OS, application, whatever). Provide your vendor's distribution and release level (e.g.: “Fedora Core 1”, “Slackware 9.1”, etc.).
Describe the research you did to try and understand the problem before you asked the question.
Describe the diagnostic steps you took to try and pin down the problem yourself before you asked the question.
Describe any recent changes in your computer or software configuration that might be relevant.
Courtesy never hurts, and sometimes helps
Be courteous. Use “Please” and “Thanks for your attention” or “Thanks for your consideration”. Make it clear that you appreciate the time people spend helping you for free.
To be honest, this isn't as important as (and cannot substitute for) being grammatical, clear, precise and descriptive, avoiding proprietary formats etc.; hackers in general would rather get somewhat brusque but technically sharp bug reports than polite vagueness. (If this puzzles you, remember that we value a question by what it teaches us.)
However, if you've got your technical ducks in a row, politeness does increase your chances of getting a useful answer.
(We must note that the only serious objection we have received from veteran tech support to this HOWTO is with respect to our previous recommendation to use “Thanks in advance”. Some tech support teams feel this connotes an intention not to thank anybody afterwards. Our recommendation is to either say “Thanks in advance” first and thank respondents afterwards, or express courtesy in a different way, such as by saying “Thanks for your attention” or “Thanks for your consideration”.)
ok I'm off my soapbox now sorry about that