Asking Questions the Smart Way

[Jay R. Ashworth]

I was reminded of this short paper by ESR just now, by watching a moron
crawling across several mailing lists for a different software project,
asking the same desperate -- and uninformative -- question on each.

If you need help with something, framing your question in the proper
fashion will likely be productive... but you have to know what that
fashion *is*.

	 ===
	In the world of hackers, the kind of answers you get to your
	technical questions depends as much on the way you ask the
	questions as on the difficulty of developing the answer. This
	guide will teach you how to ask questions in a way more likely
	to get you a satisfactory answer.

	Now that use of open source has become widespread, you can
	often get as good answers from other, more experienced users as
	from hackers. This is a Good Thing; users tend to be just a
	little bit more tolerant of the kind of failures newbies often
	have. Still, treating experienced users like hackers in the
	ways we recommend here will generally be the most effective way
	to get useful answers out of them, too.

	The first thing to understand is that hackers actually like
	hard problems and good, thought-provoking questions about them.
	If we didn't, we wouldn't be here. If you give us an
	interesting question to chew on we'll be grateful to you; good
	questions are a stimulus and a gift. Good questions help us
	develop our understanding, and often reveal problems we might
	not have noticed or thought about otherwise. Among hackers,
	'Good question!' is a strong and sincere compliment.

	Despite this, hackers have a reputation for meeting simple
	questions with what looks like hostility or arrogance. It
	sometimes looks like we're reflexively rude to newbies and the
	ignorant. But this isn't really true.

	What we are, unapologetically, is hostile to people who seem to
	be unwilling to think or to do their own homework before asking
	questions. People like that are time sinks -- they take without
	giving back, and they waste time we could have spent on another
	question more interesting and another person more worthy of an
	answer. We call people like this 'losers' (and for historical
	reasons we sometimes spell it 'lusers').

	We realize that there are many people who just want to use the
	software we write, and who have no interest in learning
	technical details. For most people, a computer is merely a
	tool, a means to an end; they have more important things to do
	and lives to live. We acknowledge that, and don't expect
	everyone to take an interest in the technical matters that
	fascinate us. Nevertheless, our style of answering questions is
	tuned for people who do take such an interest and are willing
	to be active participants in problem-solving. That's not going
	to change. Nor should it; if it did, we would become less
	effective at the things we do best.
	 ===

		http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

In short: if you want your answers for free, expect to pay for them
*somehow*.  If you aren't willing to do some of the work, get out your
wallet. 

(I think I've posted this before, but it never hurts to recap.  I'm not
aiming this at anyone in particular, so if you think it's you... :-)

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                   Baylink                      jra at baylink.com
Designer                     The Things I Think                       RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates     http://baylink.pitas.com                     '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://photo.imageinc.us             +1 727 647 1274