- Impact
- 16,190
How to Ask Questions the Smart Way (Adult Lang)
Hello fellow NP'rs,
Most of you that know me or may have seen some of
my posts understand that I seldom pull punches and
never back away from what I think is right.
Name Pros and the community there-in has taught
me literally EVERYTHING I know about domaining,
(With more to learn everyday) as well as some needed
lessons in social interaction,(also learning daily)
and I take every opportunity to show my gratitude.
This is such an occasion. I will take flak for this but
I am adamant about the importance of “manners” and
“respect” and most of all “appreciation” of what others
share freely, without any expectation of NP$, or Rep,
or anything more than a simple “Thanks” if you have
gained from what they offered.
I get criticized often for lack of patience, the basis of
which is true... I admit I lose patience with lazy, selfish,
greedy people very quickly and will express said
emotions in clear and easy to understand language.
I do not and will not apologize for this.
I was taught Netiquette in a totally different
type forum than NP (which is a commerce based
Forum).
Like the lessons learned here from the best in the world,
I was originally schooled by the best in the world
at what they do as well, but in an entirely different
environment.
How to show respect and earn respect when asking
for "handouts" from hard working, focused, and
unselfish "engineers" we will call them.
Below is an article written by two of the most
respected members of that community, and if you set
aside the myths, misconceptions and outright lies
expressed in the media and accepted as truths, there are
some very important lessons to be learned here.
Remember to leave the stereotype of the group this
was intentioned to inform and pay attention to the
what is being asked/described/demanded of the reader.
~~~~~~~~~~
(Greetz and props to mems of teh scene reading this.
This is shared in open forum with permission of the
authors and is delivered with all due love and respect.
kid5150)
~~~~~~~~~~
Eric Steven Raymond
Thyrsus Enterprises
<[email protected]>
Rick Moen
<[email protected]>
Copyright © 2001 Eric S. Raymond
Revision History
Revision 3.1
28 Oct 2004
esr
Document 'Google is your friend!'
Revision 3.0
2 Feb 2004
esr
Major addition of stuff about proper etiquette on Web forums.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Translations
Disclaimer
Introduction
Before You Ask
When You Ask
Choose your forum carefully
Web and IRC forums directed towards newbies often give the quickest response.
As a second step, use project mailing lists
Use meaningful, specific subject headers
Make it easy to reply
Write in clear, grammatical, correctly-spelled language
Send questions in formats that are easy to understand
Be precise and informative about your problem
Volume is not precision
Don't claim that you have found a bug
Grovelling is not a substitute for doing your homework
Describe the problem's symptoms, not your guesses
Describe your problem's symptoms in chronological order
Describe the goal, not the step
Don't ask people to reply by private email
Be explicit about the question you have
Don't post homework questions
Prune pointless queries
Don't flag your question as Urgent, even if it is for you
Courtesy never hurts, and sometimes helps
Follow up with a brief note on the solution
How To Interpret Answers
RTFM and STFW: How To Tell You've Seriously Screwed Up
If you don't understand...
Dealing with rudeness
On Not Reacting Like A Loser
Questions Not To Ask
Good and Bad Questions
If You Can't Get An Answer
How To Answer Questions in a Helpful Way
Related Resources
Acknowledgements
Translations
Translations: Chinese Czech Danish Estonian French German Hebrew Hungarian Italian Japanese Polish Russian Spanish Swedish Turkish. If you want to copy, mirror, translate, or excerpt this document, please see my copying policy.
Disclaimer
Many project websites link to this document in their sections on how to get help. That's fine, it's the use we intended — but if you are a webmaster creating such a link for your project page, please display prominently near the link notice that we are not a help desk for your project!
We have learned the hard way that without such a notice, we will repeatedly be pestered by idiots who think that our having published this document makes it our job to solve all the world's technical problems.
If you are reading this document because you need help, and you walk away with the impression you can get it directly from the authors, you are one of the idiots in question. Don't ask us questions. We'll just ignore you. We are here to show you how to get help from people who actually know about the software or hardware you are dealing with, but 99% of the time that will not be us. Unless you know for certain that one of the authors is an expert on what you are dealing with, leave us alone and everybody will be happier.
Introduction
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 that is likely to get you a satisfactory answer.
Now that use of open source has become widespread, you can often get answers from other, more experienced users, rather than 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, 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 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.
We're (largely) volunteers. We take time out of busy lives to answer questions, and at times we're overwhelmed with them. So we filter ruthlessly. In particular, we throw away questions from people who appear to be losers in order to spend our question-answering time more efficiently, on winners.
If you find this attitude obnoxious, condescending, or arrogant, check your assumptions. We're not asking you to genuflect to us — in fact, most of us would love nothing more than to deal with you as an equal and welcome you into our culture, if you put in the effort required to make that possible. But it's simply not efficient for us to try to help people who are not willing to help themselves. It's OK to be ignorant; it's not OK to play stupid.
So, while it isn't necessary to already be technically competent to get attention from us, it is necessary to demonstrate the kind of attitude that leads to competence — alert, thoughtful, observant, willing to be an active partner in developing a solution. If you can't live with this sort of discrimination, we suggest you pay somebody for a commercial support contract instead of asking hackers to personally donate help to you.
If you decide to come to us for help, you don't want to be one of the losers. You don't want to seem like one, either. The best way to get a rapid and responsive answer is to ask it like a person with smarts, confidence, and clues who just happens to need help on one particular problem.
(Improvements to this guide are welcome. You can mail suggestions to [email protected]. Note however that this document is not intended to be a general guide to netiquette, and I will generally reject suggestions that are not specifically related to eliciting useful answers in a technical forum.)
Before You Ask
Before asking a technical question by email, or in a newsgroup, or on a website chat board, do the following:
1. Try to find an answer by searching the Web.
2. Try to find an answer by reading the manual.
3. Try to find an answer by reading a FAQ.
4. Try to find an answer by inspection or experimentation.
5. Try to find an answer by asking a skilled friend.
6. 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. The project page may also describe a bug-reporting procedure, or have a link to one; if so, follow it.
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.
Don't shotgun-blast all the available help channels at once, that's like yelling and irritates people. Step through them.
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.
As a second step, use project mailing lists
When a project has a development mailing list, write to the mailing list, not to individual developers, even if you believe that you know who can answer your question best. Check the documentation of the project and its homepage for the address of a project mailing list, and use it. There are several good reasons for this policy:
· Any question that's good enough to be asked of one developer will also be of value to the whole group. Contrariwise, if you suspect that your question is too dumb for a mailing list, it's not an excuse to harass individual developers.
· Asking questions on the list distributes load between developers. The individual developer (especially if he's the project leader) may be too busy to answer your questions.
· Most mailing lists are archived and the archives are indexed by search engines. Somebody could find your question and the answer on the web instead of asking it again in the list.
· If certain questions are seen to be asked often, the developers can use that information to improve the documentation or the software itself to be less confusing. But if those questions are asked in private, nobody has the complete picture of what questions are asked most often.
If a project has both a “user” and a “developer” (or “hacker”) mailing list or Web forum, and you are not hacking on the code, ask in the “user” list/forum. Do not assume that you will be welcome on the developer list, where they are likely to experience your question as noise disrupting their developer traffic.
However, if you are sure your question is non-trivial, and you get no answer in the “user” list/forum for several days, try the “developer” one. You would be well advised to lurk there for a few days before posting to learn the local folkways (actually this is good advice on any private or semi-private list).
If you cannot find a project's mailing list address, but only see the address of the maintainer of the project, go ahead and write to the maintainer. But even in that case, don't assume that the mailing list doesn't exist. State in your e-mail that you tried and could not find the appropriate mailing list. Also mention that you don't object to having your message forwarded to other people. (Many people believe that private e-mail should remain private, even if there is nothing secret in it. By allowing your message to be forwarded you give your correspondent a choice about how to handle your e-mail.)
Use meaningful, specific subject headers
On mailing lists, newsgroups or Web forums, the subject header is your golden opportunity to attract qualified experts' attention in around 50 characters or fewer. Don't waste it on babble like “Please help me” (let alone “PLEASE HELP ME!!!!”; messages with subjects like that get discarded by reflex). Don't try to impress us with the depth of your anguish; use the space for a super-concise problem description instead.
A good convention for subject headers, used by many tech support organizations, is “object - deviation”. The “object” part specifies what thing or group of things is having a problem, and the “deviation” part describes the deviation from expected behavior.
Stupid:
HELP! Video doesn't work properly on my laptop!
Smart:
XFree86 4.1 misshapen mouse cursor, Fooware MV1005 vid. chipset
Smarter:
XFree86 4.1 mouse cursor on Fooware MV1005 vid. chipset - is misshapen
The process of writing an “object-deviation” description will help you organize your thinking about the problem in more detail. What is affected? Just the mouse cursor or other graphics too? Is this specific to XFree86? To version 4.1? Is this specific to Fooware video chipsets? To model MV1005? A hacker who sees the result can immediately understand what it is that you are having a problem with and the problem you are having, at a glance.
More generally, imagine looking at the index of an archive of questions, with just the subject lines showing. Make your subject line reflect your question well enough that the next guy searching the archive with a question similar to yours will be able to follow the thread to an answer rather than posting the question again.
If you ask a question in a reply, be sure to change the subject line to indicate that you are asking a question. A Subject line that looks like “Re: test” or “Re: new bug” is less likely to attract useful amounts of attention. Also, pare quotes of previous messages to the minimum consistent with cluing in new readers.
Do not simply hit reply to a list message in order to start an entirely new thread. This will limit your audience. Some mail readers, like mutt, allow the user to sort by thread and then hide messages in a thread by folding the thread. Folks who do that will never see your message.
Changing the subject is not sufficient. Mutt, and probably other mail readers, looks at other information in the email's headers to assign it to a thread, not the subject line. Instead start an entirely new email.
On Web forums the rules of good practice are slightly different, because messages are usually much more tightly bound to specfic discussion threads and often invisible outside those threads. Changing the subject when asking a question in reply is not essential (not all forums even allow separate subject lines on replies, and nearly nobody reads them when they do). But asking a question in a reply is a dubious practice in itself, because it will only be seen by those who are watching this thread. So, unless you are sure you want to ask the people currently active in the thread, start a new one.
Make it easy to reply
Finishing your query with “Please send your reply to... ” makes it quite unlikely you will get an answer. If you can't be bothered to take even the few seconds required to set up a correct Reply-To header in your mail agent, we can't be bothered to take even a few seconds to think about your problem. If your mail program doesn't permit this, get a better mail program. If your operating system doesn't support any mail programs that permit this, get a better operating system.
In Web forums, asking for a reply by email is outright rude, unless you believe the information may be sensitive (and somebody will, for some unknown reason, let you but not the whole forum know it). If you want to get an email when somebody replies in the thread, request that the Web forum send it; this feature is supported almost everywhere under options like “watch this thread”, “send email on answers”, etc.)
Write in clear, grammatical, correctly-spelled language
We've found by experience that people who are careless and sloppy writers are usually also careless and sloppy at thinking and coding (often enough to bet on, anyway). Answering questions for careless and sloppy thinkers is not rewarding; we'd rather spend our time elsewhere.
So expressing your question clearly and well is important. If you can't be bothered to do that, we can't be bothered to pay attention. Spend the extra effort to polish your language. It doesn't have to be stiff or formal — in fact, hacker culture values informal, slangy and humorous language used with precision. But it has to be precise; there has to be some indication that you're thinking and paying attention.
Spell, punctuate, and capitalize correctly. Don't confuse “its” with “it's”, “loose” with “lose”, or “discrete” with “discreet”. Don't TYPE IN ALL CAPS, this is read as shouting and considered rude. (All-smalls is only slightly less annoying, as it's difficult to read. Alan Cox can get away with it, but you can't.)
More generally, if you write like a semi-literate boob you will very likely be ignored. Writing like a l33t script kiddie hax0r is the absolute kiss of death and guarantees you will receive nothing but stony silence (or, at best, a heaping helping of scorn and sarcasm) in return.
If you are asking questions in a forum that does not use your native language, you will get a limited amount of slack for spelling and grammar errors — but no extra slack at all for laziness (and yes, we can usually spot that difference). Also, unless you know what your respondent's languages are, write in English. Busy hackers tend to simply flush questions in languages they don't understand, and English is the working language of the Internet. By writing in English you minimize your chances that your question will be discarded unread.
Send questions in formats that are easy to understand
If you make your question artificially hard to read, it is more likely to be passed over in favor of one that isn't. So:
· Send plain text mail, not HTML. (It's not hard to turn off HTML.)
· MIME attachments are usually OK, but only if they are real content (such as an attached source file or patch), and not merely boilerplate generated by your mail client (such as another copy of your message).
· Don't send mail in which entire paragraphs are single multiply-wrapped lines. (This makes it too difficult to reply to just part of the message.) Assume that your respondents will be reading mail on 80-character-wide text displays and set your line wrap accordingly, to something less than 80.
· However, do not wrap data (such as log file dumps or session transcripts) at any fixed column width. Data should be included as-is, so respondents can have confidence that they are seeing what you saw.
· Don't send MIME Quoted-Printable encoding to an English-language forum. This encoding can be necessary when you're posting in a language ASCII doesn't cover, but a lot of mail agents don't support it. When they break, all those =20 glyphs scattered through the text are ugly and distracting.
· Never, ever expect hackers to be able to read closed proprietary document formats like Microsoft Word or Excel. Most hackers react to these about as well as you would to having a pile of steaming pig manure dumped on your doorstep. Even when they can cope, they resent having to do so.
· If you're sending mail from a Windows machine, turn off Microsoft's stupid “Smart Quotes” feature. This is so you'll avoid sprinkling garbage characters through your mail.
· In Web forums, do not abuse “smiley” and “html” features (when they are present). A smiley or two is usually OK, but colored fancy text tends to make people think you are lame. Seriously overusing smileys and color and fonts will make you come off like a giggly teenage girl, which is not generally a good idea unless you are more interested in sex than answers.
If you're using a graphical-user-interface mail client, (such as Netscape Messenger, MS Outlook, or their ilk) beware that it may violate these rules when used with its default settings. Most such clients have a menu-based “View Source” command. Use this on something in your sent-mail folder to check that you are sending plain text without unnecessary attached crud.
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 2”, “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.
Do the best you can to anticipate the questions a hacker will ask, and to answer them in advance in your request for help.
Simon Tatham has written an excellent essay entitled How to Report Bugs Effectively. I strongly recommend that you read it.
Volume is not precision
You need to be precise and informative. This end is not served by simply dumping huge volumes of code or data into a help request. If you have a large, complicated test case that is breaking a program, try to trim it and make it as small as possible.
This is useful for at least three reasons. One: being seen to invest effort in simplifying the question makes it more likely that you'll get an answer, Two: simplifying the question makes it more likely you'll get a useful answer. Three: In the process of refining your bug report, you may develop a fix or workaround yourself.
Hello fellow NP'rs,
Most of you that know me or may have seen some of
my posts understand that I seldom pull punches and
never back away from what I think is right.
Name Pros and the community there-in has taught
me literally EVERYTHING I know about domaining,
(With more to learn everyday) as well as some needed
lessons in social interaction,(also learning daily)
and I take every opportunity to show my gratitude.
This is such an occasion. I will take flak for this but
I am adamant about the importance of “manners” and
“respect” and most of all “appreciation” of what others
share freely, without any expectation of NP$, or Rep,
or anything more than a simple “Thanks” if you have
gained from what they offered.
I get criticized often for lack of patience, the basis of
which is true... I admit I lose patience with lazy, selfish,
greedy people very quickly and will express said
emotions in clear and easy to understand language.
I do not and will not apologize for this.
I was taught Netiquette in a totally different
type forum than NP (which is a commerce based
Forum).
Like the lessons learned here from the best in the world,
I was originally schooled by the best in the world
at what they do as well, but in an entirely different
environment.
How to show respect and earn respect when asking
for "handouts" from hard working, focused, and
unselfish "engineers" we will call them.
Below is an article written by two of the most
respected members of that community, and if you set
aside the myths, misconceptions and outright lies
expressed in the media and accepted as truths, there are
some very important lessons to be learned here.
Remember to leave the stereotype of the group this
was intentioned to inform and pay attention to the
what is being asked/described/demanded of the reader.
~~~~~~~~~~
(Greetz and props to mems of teh scene reading this.
This is shared in open forum with permission of the
authors and is delivered with all due love and respect.
kid5150)
~~~~~~~~~~
How To Ask Questions The Smart Way
Eric Steven Raymond
Thyrsus Enterprises
<[email protected]>
Rick Moen
<[email protected]>
Copyright © 2001 Eric S. Raymond
Revision History
Revision 3.1
28 Oct 2004
esr
Document 'Google is your friend!'
Revision 3.0
2 Feb 2004
esr
Major addition of stuff about proper etiquette on Web forums.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Table of Contents
Translations
Disclaimer
Introduction
Before You Ask
When You Ask
Choose your forum carefully
Web and IRC forums directed towards newbies often give the quickest response.
As a second step, use project mailing lists
Use meaningful, specific subject headers
Make it easy to reply
Write in clear, grammatical, correctly-spelled language
Send questions in formats that are easy to understand
Be precise and informative about your problem
Volume is not precision
Don't claim that you have found a bug
Grovelling is not a substitute for doing your homework
Describe the problem's symptoms, not your guesses
Describe your problem's symptoms in chronological order
Describe the goal, not the step
Don't ask people to reply by private email
Be explicit about the question you have
Don't post homework questions
Prune pointless queries
Don't flag your question as Urgent, even if it is for you
Courtesy never hurts, and sometimes helps
Follow up with a brief note on the solution
How To Interpret Answers
RTFM and STFW: How To Tell You've Seriously Screwed Up
If you don't understand...
Dealing with rudeness
On Not Reacting Like A Loser
Questions Not To Ask
Good and Bad Questions
If You Can't Get An Answer
How To Answer Questions in a Helpful Way
Related Resources
Acknowledgements
Translations
Translations: Chinese Czech Danish Estonian French German Hebrew Hungarian Italian Japanese Polish Russian Spanish Swedish Turkish. If you want to copy, mirror, translate, or excerpt this document, please see my copying policy.
Disclaimer
Many project websites link to this document in their sections on how to get help. That's fine, it's the use we intended — but if you are a webmaster creating such a link for your project page, please display prominently near the link notice that we are not a help desk for your project!
We have learned the hard way that without such a notice, we will repeatedly be pestered by idiots who think that our having published this document makes it our job to solve all the world's technical problems.
If you are reading this document because you need help, and you walk away with the impression you can get it directly from the authors, you are one of the idiots in question. Don't ask us questions. We'll just ignore you. We are here to show you how to get help from people who actually know about the software or hardware you are dealing with, but 99% of the time that will not be us. Unless you know for certain that one of the authors is an expert on what you are dealing with, leave us alone and everybody will be happier.
Introduction
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 that is likely to get you a satisfactory answer.
Now that use of open source has become widespread, you can often get answers from other, more experienced users, rather than 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, 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 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.
We're (largely) volunteers. We take time out of busy lives to answer questions, and at times we're overwhelmed with them. So we filter ruthlessly. In particular, we throw away questions from people who appear to be losers in order to spend our question-answering time more efficiently, on winners.
If you find this attitude obnoxious, condescending, or arrogant, check your assumptions. We're not asking you to genuflect to us — in fact, most of us would love nothing more than to deal with you as an equal and welcome you into our culture, if you put in the effort required to make that possible. But it's simply not efficient for us to try to help people who are not willing to help themselves. It's OK to be ignorant; it's not OK to play stupid.
So, while it isn't necessary to already be technically competent to get attention from us, it is necessary to demonstrate the kind of attitude that leads to competence — alert, thoughtful, observant, willing to be an active partner in developing a solution. If you can't live with this sort of discrimination, we suggest you pay somebody for a commercial support contract instead of asking hackers to personally donate help to you.
If you decide to come to us for help, you don't want to be one of the losers. You don't want to seem like one, either. The best way to get a rapid and responsive answer is to ask it like a person with smarts, confidence, and clues who just happens to need help on one particular problem.
(Improvements to this guide are welcome. You can mail suggestions to [email protected]. Note however that this document is not intended to be a general guide to netiquette, and I will generally reject suggestions that are not specifically related to eliciting useful answers in a technical forum.)
Before You Ask
Before asking a technical question by email, or in a newsgroup, or on a website chat board, do the following:
1. Try to find an answer by searching the Web.
2. Try to find an answer by reading the manual.
3. Try to find an answer by reading a FAQ.
4. Try to find an answer by inspection or experimentation.
5. Try to find an answer by asking a skilled friend.
6. 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. The project page may also describe a bug-reporting procedure, or have a link to one; if so, follow it.
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.
Don't shotgun-blast all the available help channels at once, that's like yelling and irritates people. Step through them.
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.
As a second step, use project mailing lists
When a project has a development mailing list, write to the mailing list, not to individual developers, even if you believe that you know who can answer your question best. Check the documentation of the project and its homepage for the address of a project mailing list, and use it. There are several good reasons for this policy:
· Any question that's good enough to be asked of one developer will also be of value to the whole group. Contrariwise, if you suspect that your question is too dumb for a mailing list, it's not an excuse to harass individual developers.
· Asking questions on the list distributes load between developers. The individual developer (especially if he's the project leader) may be too busy to answer your questions.
· Most mailing lists are archived and the archives are indexed by search engines. Somebody could find your question and the answer on the web instead of asking it again in the list.
· If certain questions are seen to be asked often, the developers can use that information to improve the documentation or the software itself to be less confusing. But if those questions are asked in private, nobody has the complete picture of what questions are asked most often.
If a project has both a “user” and a “developer” (or “hacker”) mailing list or Web forum, and you are not hacking on the code, ask in the “user” list/forum. Do not assume that you will be welcome on the developer list, where they are likely to experience your question as noise disrupting their developer traffic.
However, if you are sure your question is non-trivial, and you get no answer in the “user” list/forum for several days, try the “developer” one. You would be well advised to lurk there for a few days before posting to learn the local folkways (actually this is good advice on any private or semi-private list).
If you cannot find a project's mailing list address, but only see the address of the maintainer of the project, go ahead and write to the maintainer. But even in that case, don't assume that the mailing list doesn't exist. State in your e-mail that you tried and could not find the appropriate mailing list. Also mention that you don't object to having your message forwarded to other people. (Many people believe that private e-mail should remain private, even if there is nothing secret in it. By allowing your message to be forwarded you give your correspondent a choice about how to handle your e-mail.)
Use meaningful, specific subject headers
On mailing lists, newsgroups or Web forums, the subject header is your golden opportunity to attract qualified experts' attention in around 50 characters or fewer. Don't waste it on babble like “Please help me” (let alone “PLEASE HELP ME!!!!”; messages with subjects like that get discarded by reflex). Don't try to impress us with the depth of your anguish; use the space for a super-concise problem description instead.
A good convention for subject headers, used by many tech support organizations, is “object - deviation”. The “object” part specifies what thing or group of things is having a problem, and the “deviation” part describes the deviation from expected behavior.
Stupid:
HELP! Video doesn't work properly on my laptop!
Smart:
XFree86 4.1 misshapen mouse cursor, Fooware MV1005 vid. chipset
Smarter:
XFree86 4.1 mouse cursor on Fooware MV1005 vid. chipset - is misshapen
The process of writing an “object-deviation” description will help you organize your thinking about the problem in more detail. What is affected? Just the mouse cursor or other graphics too? Is this specific to XFree86? To version 4.1? Is this specific to Fooware video chipsets? To model MV1005? A hacker who sees the result can immediately understand what it is that you are having a problem with and the problem you are having, at a glance.
More generally, imagine looking at the index of an archive of questions, with just the subject lines showing. Make your subject line reflect your question well enough that the next guy searching the archive with a question similar to yours will be able to follow the thread to an answer rather than posting the question again.
If you ask a question in a reply, be sure to change the subject line to indicate that you are asking a question. A Subject line that looks like “Re: test” or “Re: new bug” is less likely to attract useful amounts of attention. Also, pare quotes of previous messages to the minimum consistent with cluing in new readers.
Do not simply hit reply to a list message in order to start an entirely new thread. This will limit your audience. Some mail readers, like mutt, allow the user to sort by thread and then hide messages in a thread by folding the thread. Folks who do that will never see your message.
Changing the subject is not sufficient. Mutt, and probably other mail readers, looks at other information in the email's headers to assign it to a thread, not the subject line. Instead start an entirely new email.
On Web forums the rules of good practice are slightly different, because messages are usually much more tightly bound to specfic discussion threads and often invisible outside those threads. Changing the subject when asking a question in reply is not essential (not all forums even allow separate subject lines on replies, and nearly nobody reads them when they do). But asking a question in a reply is a dubious practice in itself, because it will only be seen by those who are watching this thread. So, unless you are sure you want to ask the people currently active in the thread, start a new one.
Make it easy to reply
Finishing your query with “Please send your reply to... ” makes it quite unlikely you will get an answer. If you can't be bothered to take even the few seconds required to set up a correct Reply-To header in your mail agent, we can't be bothered to take even a few seconds to think about your problem. If your mail program doesn't permit this, get a better mail program. If your operating system doesn't support any mail programs that permit this, get a better operating system.
In Web forums, asking for a reply by email is outright rude, unless you believe the information may be sensitive (and somebody will, for some unknown reason, let you but not the whole forum know it). If you want to get an email when somebody replies in the thread, request that the Web forum send it; this feature is supported almost everywhere under options like “watch this thread”, “send email on answers”, etc.)
Write in clear, grammatical, correctly-spelled language
We've found by experience that people who are careless and sloppy writers are usually also careless and sloppy at thinking and coding (often enough to bet on, anyway). Answering questions for careless and sloppy thinkers is not rewarding; we'd rather spend our time elsewhere.
So expressing your question clearly and well is important. If you can't be bothered to do that, we can't be bothered to pay attention. Spend the extra effort to polish your language. It doesn't have to be stiff or formal — in fact, hacker culture values informal, slangy and humorous language used with precision. But it has to be precise; there has to be some indication that you're thinking and paying attention.
Spell, punctuate, and capitalize correctly. Don't confuse “its” with “it's”, “loose” with “lose”, or “discrete” with “discreet”. Don't TYPE IN ALL CAPS, this is read as shouting and considered rude. (All-smalls is only slightly less annoying, as it's difficult to read. Alan Cox can get away with it, but you can't.)
More generally, if you write like a semi-literate boob you will very likely be ignored. Writing like a l33t script kiddie hax0r is the absolute kiss of death and guarantees you will receive nothing but stony silence (or, at best, a heaping helping of scorn and sarcasm) in return.
If you are asking questions in a forum that does not use your native language, you will get a limited amount of slack for spelling and grammar errors — but no extra slack at all for laziness (and yes, we can usually spot that difference). Also, unless you know what your respondent's languages are, write in English. Busy hackers tend to simply flush questions in languages they don't understand, and English is the working language of the Internet. By writing in English you minimize your chances that your question will be discarded unread.
Send questions in formats that are easy to understand
If you make your question artificially hard to read, it is more likely to be passed over in favor of one that isn't. So:
· Send plain text mail, not HTML. (It's not hard to turn off HTML.)
· MIME attachments are usually OK, but only if they are real content (such as an attached source file or patch), and not merely boilerplate generated by your mail client (such as another copy of your message).
· Don't send mail in which entire paragraphs are single multiply-wrapped lines. (This makes it too difficult to reply to just part of the message.) Assume that your respondents will be reading mail on 80-character-wide text displays and set your line wrap accordingly, to something less than 80.
· However, do not wrap data (such as log file dumps or session transcripts) at any fixed column width. Data should be included as-is, so respondents can have confidence that they are seeing what you saw.
· Don't send MIME Quoted-Printable encoding to an English-language forum. This encoding can be necessary when you're posting in a language ASCII doesn't cover, but a lot of mail agents don't support it. When they break, all those =20 glyphs scattered through the text are ugly and distracting.
· Never, ever expect hackers to be able to read closed proprietary document formats like Microsoft Word or Excel. Most hackers react to these about as well as you would to having a pile of steaming pig manure dumped on your doorstep. Even when they can cope, they resent having to do so.
· If you're sending mail from a Windows machine, turn off Microsoft's stupid “Smart Quotes” feature. This is so you'll avoid sprinkling garbage characters through your mail.
· In Web forums, do not abuse “smiley” and “html” features (when they are present). A smiley or two is usually OK, but colored fancy text tends to make people think you are lame. Seriously overusing smileys and color and fonts will make you come off like a giggly teenage girl, which is not generally a good idea unless you are more interested in sex than answers.
If you're using a graphical-user-interface mail client, (such as Netscape Messenger, MS Outlook, or their ilk) beware that it may violate these rules when used with its default settings. Most such clients have a menu-based “View Source” command. Use this on something in your sent-mail folder to check that you are sending plain text without unnecessary attached crud.
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 2”, “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.
Do the best you can to anticipate the questions a hacker will ask, and to answer them in advance in your request for help.
Simon Tatham has written an excellent essay entitled How to Report Bugs Effectively. I strongly recommend that you read it.
Volume is not precision
You need to be precise and informative. This end is not served by simply dumping huge volumes of code or data into a help request. If you have a large, complicated test case that is breaking a program, try to trim it and make it as small as possible.
This is useful for at least three reasons. One: being seen to invest effort in simplifying the question makes it more likely that you'll get an answer, Two: simplifying the question makes it more likely you'll get a useful answer. Three: In the process of refining your bug report, you may develop a fix or workaround yourself.
(end part one)
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