Summarizing a couple of choice parts of
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html for these XPist unwashed masses...
Before you ask
Take the time to try to solve your problem yourself. Ask your friends and the local computer guru. Search the web (Google!) and technical support boards; Somebody might have had the same problem as you before.
One good tactic for Google and bulletin boards is searching for the exact error message (or the most distinctive part of it) you received. Note what this implies; By asking questions informatively, you are actually helping others since people who have the same problem as you in the future can just read the answer that has been given to your question.
When you ask
Choose your subject line with care. It's what gets people to look at your question, after all. The subject should be a very concise explanation of your problem and include as much information as sensefully possible. Using huge amounts of abbreviations or writing subject lines that are so long that the board software cuts them off is deprecated, though.
Write your question in clear, grammatical and correctly spelled English. If you don't have the time to formulate your question correctly, why would you expect other people to have the time to answer it? Don't worry if English isn't your native language, though - people
will cut you some extra slack for grammar mistakes.
Remember to include all the information that is relevant to your problem, but as little more as possible. Just dumping the output of a random system analyzer program on the forum will only make people ignore you - besides, it will give the idea that you're not willing to go through the trouble of figuring out what things are relevant to your problem and what aren't. Describe the relevant parts of your system in more detail than the irrelevant ones. Describe deviations instead of expectable things.
If possible, describe the changes that you've made to your system before it broke. Do this even if it seems that there ought to be no relation between what you did and what happened. Computers are complicated things. Also describe what you've already tried to do to solve the problem.
Don't say that your problem is urgent or write your subject in ALLCAPS. It might be urgent to
you, but that's irrelevant to the question itself. You aren't paying for the service so you don't get to set the priorities.
Oh, and don't forget common sense. Having read through this doc, don't forget to follow rules that I have omitted but that are clearly required for senseful problem-solving.
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BTW, a couple of notes for those who are going to read that document itself: First, hackers aren't the guys who crack into computer systems, they're people who like playing with technology and programming. Secondly, it's geared towards asking questions in newsgroups and/or mailing lists, which have different traditions than bulletin boards. Some things carry over, some don't; For example, if you want to indicate to people that your problem is fixed and they don't need to spend their time on it anymore, you'd edit the title of the first post (and thus the thread... well, this depends on the BB software) to include the word "Fixed". But you would not start a new thread just to indicate that your problem is solved.
This post is in public domain (although the document I summarized is not - see
http://www.catb.org/~esr/copying.html ). Feel free to quote, mangle and distribute it with or without reference to me...
and njovin can be a bit harsh!!!!! No NEED!!!
That's it..!
Linear Mode
