A look at the section titles of the document reveals that a lot of effort has been made to put the advice in positive (do this) instead of negative (don't do that!), even if the document itself is clearly a catalog of donts. So it ends up sounding as if asking questions were a terribly complex endeavor, when in fact it just requires common sense and politeness.
Problem is that if you're prone to commit those faux-pas, you're not going to read this document before hand anyway. Its purpose seems to be to direct offenders to it to make them aware of their faults.
This might make it slightly easier for some of you to read this. The document is in UTF-8. There are two places in the document that say it's in UTF-8. Yet the server currently reports the charset as iso-8859-1. So that's what Chrome's autodetect uses...
Jargon file entries appear to have the opposite problem -- server reports utf-8, but the file is in iso-8859-1, and it claims to be iso-8859-1.
"If you're sending e-mail from a Windows machine, turn off Microsoft's problematic “Smart Quotes†feature ... This is so you'll avoid sprinkling garbage characters through your mail."
Heck, I LOVE reading, and I can't be bothered to actually read it. What are the chances that non-techies are going to read it, let alone actually follow it?
From what I skimmed, the advice is spot-on... But people with a problem don't have patience. They need to fix the problem and move on. And the ones asking for free help on the internet are usually not willing to pay for it. (People who have already exhausted other means are the exception... But then, they're already following this document!)
We have this as the !ask command in #Rubyonrails for when somebody asks to ask. It really improves the kind of questions that people would ask if you first ask them to read it.
You can't just expect people to chance across golden nuggets of knowledge like this one, you must lead them there first.
For best results, play on the emotions of technical folk. It is like the old saying: Instead of asking "how can I do X in Linux?", state "Linux sucks, it cannot do X!"
Not only will people go out of their way to prove you wrong – thereby answering your question – but the resultant discussion will also provide insight into the problem beyond what would not normally be given in a direct response. The latter is often just as valuable as the answer itself.
I don't really want to advocate the behaviour, but it is interesting to see how people react to each.
There should be one of these for "How to Open an Issue on an Issue Tracker the Smart Way." To get an account on an issue tracker system, you have to pass a quiz on it.
In the section "Be precise and informative about your problem" of the article there is a link to Simon Tatham's (PuTTY author) "How to Report Bugs Effectively": http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html
I've seen several open source projects link to that document as well, so it might be what you are looking for.
> 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...
If people really thought of those questions as time sinks, they wouldn't bother responding. The aggravated forum response smacks more of a perverted delight in bullying the novice.
And I understand the impulse. You've just answered the same question three times, and get it again? What gives!? Someone should smack these people!
But if people are asking the same questions over and over, it's time to take another look at your search/FAQ/layout. If people are hostile to other people on your forum, it shouldn't be dismissed as "they just love challenging questions." It's time to fix your buggy culture.
Someone should write a companion piece working on the other end. How to Answer (Stupid) Questions the Smart Way:
1. If hate customer service, let someone else handle it.
The article is simply a massive preachy FAQ with intricate advice that really boils down to common sense and good manners. And yeah, the people who lack the common sense to post good questions, are not going to ever read something like that.
I think that the atmosphere and characteristics of the forum determines the quality of the questions more than anything else and especially more than any list of "rules" in the FAQ or front matter of the forum.
There are so many crummy forums out there and only a small number of really good ones. Comparing the crappy ones with the good ones, I'd say that a forum can cultivate "good questions" by using some of the following techniques:
[1] A good number of non-anonymous posters. If you have your name in the game, you're less likely to behave badly.
[2] Active moderators who aren't afraid of yanking stuff or even requiring approval for each post.
[3] Crowd-sourced up/down votes
[4] A very specific topic.
The internet has really progressed since that article was written.
Instead of hackers getting angry at newcomers we have resources such as stackexchange and quora that filter up the top questions and answers and make them easy to find.
Especially the 'ask to ask' over instant messenger, when you're known to be responsible for something.
People giving polite introductions to themselves when I'm working annoys me greatly, as they're only saying "hi" to ask a question, and it requires that I respond to them and break my focus as they spend the next 3-5 minutes writing a question; whereas they could have just spent those 3-5 minutes saying in their IM:
"Hi,
I'm working on <X> and <Y> happened. Have you come across this before; and, how do I fix this?"
And accomplish the same thing without wasting my time.
usually when i do the 7 steps described in "Before you ask" section, at that point if the question is not answered than nobody in the world will answer my question. So to conclude this paper should not exist.
nobody in the world will answer my question - It sounds like you haven't been asking the right questions. You'd be surprised at who turns up to answer really good questions.
All 7 steps are really overkill, but the first four, and enough of five ("inspection or experimentation") to apply what you find out from the first four steps, really are essential.
The last two steps (skilled friends & source code) are really optional, and if you need to resort to these to find the answer, it is likely that your problem is interesting to the mailing list.
It's worth comparing ESR's essay to SO's How to Ask page - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/how-to-ask - which asks much less of the questioner, and reflects the difference between mailing list culture and that at SO.
I would expect the primary differences don't stem from "culture" so much as differing technical platforms. If your question is actually a Wiki, and can be interactively refined in conjunction with the answerers, the need to complete the checklist in advance is lessened. In the end, the checklist will pretty much end up filled out one way or another, and there's still a such thing as a bad question and a bad questioner, but in both cases there's a better (if not 100%) chance to rehabilitate them interactively.
Are you able to provide links to previous questions you have asked? Perhaps that can help someone reply with suggestions that might answer the original questions, or explain why the questions were not answered back when you asked them.
Bookmarked for later, thanks. But seems like an awful lot of trouble just to get asking right lol. From the comments seems like mixed feelings about this one.
No, most people agree that the article is correct about how to ask... They just disagree about whether the people who don't already know this will read it.
You're kind of proving our point. :D
Once you get into the habit of asking correctly, future questions are really easy. You'll have seen the results of asking the right question AFTER you have done your own research.
You'll also have learned how easy it is to get answers to most questions without asking a live human. And how much faster, too.
I wasn't asking a question... Dont know how I kind of proved any point by saying I planed to educate myself by reading the article lol. I was just making a statement about others comments and the general appearance of the article. Perhaps if it looked more "friendly" more people who should read it would read it.
Problem is that if you're prone to commit those faux-pas, you're not going to read this document before hand anyway. Its purpose seems to be to direct offenders to it to make them aware of their faults.