

How To Ask Questions The Smart Way - tokenadult
http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

======
narag
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.

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wnoise
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.

~~~
JacobAldridge
That might explain this, ironic, section:

 _"If you're sending e-mail from a Windows machine, turn off Microsoft's
problematic â€œSmart Quotesâ€ feature ... This is so you'll avoid sprinkling
garbage characters through your mail."_

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maqr
The people who most need to read this document will never read it.

~~~
wccrawford
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!)

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Benjo
Related: Amy Hoy on "Help Vampires"

<http://slash7.com/2006/12/22/vampires/>

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iwwr
Make people work as least as possible and you maximize the chance of getting
an answer.

~~~
randomdata
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.

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LeafStorm
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.

~~~
lambda_cube
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.

------
Triumvark
> 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.

2\. Provide the most efficient answer.

3\. Don't question the question.

4\. Assume good faith (to crib from Wikipedia).

5\. ...

------
hm2k
<http://labs.phurix.net/articles/how-to-ask-a-question>

------
angdis
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.

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Luyt
A classic. I also read esr's other material, like the 'Cathedral and the
Bazaar', and the his views on the Halloween Documents.

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niklas_a
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.

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diminish
irc guidelines enlighten our daily speech too ;)

~~~
sukuriant
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.

</rant>

------
majmun
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.

~~~
chalst
_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.

~~~
jerf
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.

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RobertHubert
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.

~~~
wccrawford
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.

~~~
RobertHubert
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.

