Getting Answers

In my experience IRC is absolutely the worst place to ask technical questions. You have to be there at the same time as someone who knows the answer, you have to stick around and be ready to respond if someone replies, all the while multi-tasking to filter out all the other conversations in case the responder doesn&#x27;t use your nick in the response, once you get a response you either have to clunkily weave your conversation into a bunch of other chat or use a direct chat, and the chance of anyone else ever seeing your question <i>and</i> locating the answer is tiny, going to zero if you use direct chat after the initial response. And as the author says, you can&#x27;t paste more than a line of code without breaking netiquette.<p>A close second is mailing lists, which the author does mention. I think it&#x27;s pretty well established that the only way a mailing list can be pleasant to read is if every single participant is uses the same mail client and formats their responses identically, taking great pains to format the exact same way, which has never happened.<p>There is already a solution which naturally encourages all the good behaviour in this article: Stack Overflow and co.

So nice article, so poorly titled on HN. Kind of irony here.<p>Missing tip: when creating a new question on Stack or traditional forum: make your question topic describe the root of the problem. Be concise. You will increase chance that somebody that potentially knows the answer will come to help.<p>Titling your topic &quot;problem&quot;, &quot;need help&quot;, &quot;my app doesn&#x27;t work&quot; isn&#x27;t going to help you and will frustrate others, usually dealing with people breaking half of the tips from the article.

Read and understand the output before asking for help. I know this sounds ridiculous or even condescending, but anyone who has worked in this field long enough knows what I mean.

I keep realizing that asking good questions is a truly important skill in any profession and any situation.<p>Couple of books I found useful :-<p>A more beautiful question - Warren Berger Power Questions - Andrew Sobel Secrets of Question Based Selling - Thomas Freese.

As I read this, I ruminated on my travails at getting a standard USB mouse to work on Ubuntu 18.04. I didn’t ask any questions in forums, largely because all of my hours of searches revealed an entitled community responding to other questioners with NIH (It’s a hardware problem, even though your hardware works on other OSs.), instructions that demonstrably don’t work, or just not responding at all. I don’t mean to take anything away from the author’s fine article; it truly is good. But there can be toxic communities. There can be problems that are entirely opaque to the uninitiated. (Who configures mice in 2019?) And there can be problems for which Googling sends you down a maze of dismissive and entitled responses.<p>Also, if anyone here has gotten an Anker vertical USB mouse to stay awake, scroll smoothly, and click reliably on a clean install of 18.04, I’m all ears. :D

Mildly unrelated, but there should be a nice and polite in-person variation of RTFM. It is certainly annoying when certain questions are asked but they are just a google away.

I disagree that ESR&#x27;s HTAQTSW is condescending. The fact that people, over years of time, have written and updated that guide for the benefit of others is the opposite of condescending. IMO calling it condescending is tantamount to violating rule #7 from this guide.<p>And I disagree that &quot;RTFM&quot; is a useless answer. When it&#x27;s correct, it&#x27;s the most useful answer one can get. To put it another way, it&#x27;s only useless if one refuses to accept it--which is, again, like violating rule #7.<p>There might be a place for an abridged version of HTAQTSW, but I don&#x27;t think this is it, because it doesn&#x27;t improve upon it, and it denigrates it.

While somewhat related to point 8 (Follow up after getting an answer), my pet peeve is people who post about a problem they are having, not getting any response, then a final &quot;Oh, never mind, I figured it out&quot;.<p>Auuggghhhh! The forums you use are a great resource not just for you but for others. A posted solution could help other people who are searching for the same question.