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). Knowing these rules will help both you and the rest of the Inkscape community.If someone replied to your topic with a link to this resource, understand they want to help you so please read it in full before returning to your topic.
Content
- Introduction
- Before you ask
- When you ask
- Choose your forum carefully
- Use meaningful, specific subject
- Don't ask people to reply by private e-mail or message
- Grovelling is not a substitute for doing your homework
- Describe the goal, not the step
- Be explicit about your question
- Don't flag your question as “Urgent”, even if it is for you
- Follow up with a brief note on the solution
1. Introduction
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 more likely to get you a satisfactory answer.
The first thing to understand is that we 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. “Good question!” is a strong and sincere compliment.
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.
2. Before you ask
Before asking a technical question by e-mail, or in a newsgroup, or on a website chat board, do the following:
- Try to find an answer by searching the archives of the forum you plan to post to.
- Try to find an answer by searching the Web.
- Try to find an answer by reading the manual.
- Try to find an answer by reading a FAQ.
- Try to find an answer by inspection or experimentation.
Prepare your question. Think it through. Hasty-sounding questions get hasty answers, or none at all. The more you do to demonstrate that having put thought and effort into solving your problem before seeking help, the more likely you are to actually get help.
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 substantial, interesting, and thought-provoking question — one that implicitly contributes to the experience of the community rather than merely passively demanding knowledge from others.
3. When you ask
3.1 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's off topic
- cross-post to more than one forum
- post a personal message to somebody who is neither an acquaintance of yours nor personally responsible for solving your problem
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 forum before you post. It may find you an answer, and if not it will help you formulate a better question.
3.2 Use meaningful, specific subject
The subject 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.
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.
Do not simply hit reply to topic in order to start an entirely new thread. 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 only the people currently active in the thread, start a new one.
3.3 Don't ask people to reply by private e-mail or message
Asking for a reply by e-mail 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 an e-mail copy when somebody replies in the thread, request that the forum send it; this feature is supported with the option “Notify me when a reply is posted”.
Solving problems should be a public, transparent process during which a first try at an answer can and should be corrected if someone more knowledgeable notices that it is incomplete or incorrect. Also, helpers get some of their reward for being respondents from being seen to be competent and knowledgeable by their peers.
3.4 Grovelling is not a substitute for doing your homework
Some people who get that they shouldn't behave rudely or arrogantly, demanding an answer, retreat to the opposite extreme of grovelling. “I know I'm just a pathetic newbie loser, but...”. This is distracting and unhelpful. It's especially annoying when it's coupled with vagueness about the actual problem.
3.5 Describe the goal, not the step
If you are trying to find out how to do something, begin by describing the goal. Only then describe the particular step towards it that you are blocked on.
Often, people who need technical help have a high-level goal in mind and get stuck on what they think is one particular path towards the goal. They come for help with the step, but don't realize that the path is wrong. It can take substantial effort to get past this.
Stupid:
How do I get the color-picker on the FooDraw program to take a hexadecimal RGB value?
Smart:
I'm trying to replace the color table on an image with values of my choosing. Right now the only way I can see to do this is by editing each table slot, but I can't get FooDraw's color picker to take a hexadecimal RGB value.
The second version of the question is smart. It allows an answer that suggests a tool better suited to the task.
3.6 Be explicit about your question
Open-ended questions tend to be perceived as open-ended time sinks. Those people most likely to be able to give you a useful answer are also the busiest people (if only because they take on the most work themselves). People like that are allergic to open-ended time sinks, thus they tend to be allergic to open-ended questions.
You are more likely to get a useful response if you are explicit about what you want respondents to do (provide pointers, describe a process, whatever). This will focus their effort and implicitly put an upper bound on the time and energy a respondent must allocate to helping you. This is good.
3.7 Don't flag your question as “Urgent”, even if it is for you
That's your problem, not ours. Claiming urgency is very likely to be counter-productive: most will simply ignore such messages as rude and selfish attempts to elicit immediate and special attention.
3.8 Follow up with a brief note on the solution
Reply to the topic after the problem has been solved for those who helped you; let them know how it came out and thank them again for their help.
Besides being courteous and informative, this sort of followup will help others searching the archive of the forum to know exactly which solution helped you and thus may also help them.
4. How To Interpret Answers
4.1 RTFM and STFW: How To Tell You've Seriously Screwed Up
There is an ancient and hallowed tradition: if you get a reply that reads “RTFM”, the person who sent it thinks you should have Read The F***ing Manual. He or she is almost certainly right. Go read it.
RTFM has a younger relative. If you get a reply that reads “STFW”, the person who sent it thinks you should have Searched The F***ing Web. He or she is almost certainly right. Go search it. (The milder version of this is when you are told “Google is your friend!”).
You may also be told to search the forum. In fact, someone may even be so kind as to provide a pointer to the previous thread where this problem was solved. But do not rely on this consideration; do your archive-searching before asking.
Often, the person telling you to do a search has the manual or the web page with the information you need open, and is looking at it as he or she types. These replies mean that he thinks (a) the information you need is easy to find, and (b) you will learn more if you seek out the information than if you have it spoon-fed to you.
You shouldn't be offended by this; your respondent is showing you a rough kind of respect simply by not ignoring you. You should instead be thankful for this grandmotherly kindness.
4.2 If you don't understand...
If you don't understand the answer, do not immediately bounce back a demand for clarification. Use the same tools that you used to try and answer your original question (manuals, FAQs, the Web, skilled friends) to understand the answer. Then, if you still need to ask for clarification, exhibit what you have learned.
For example, suppose I tell you: “It sounds like you need to use a clip.” Then: here's a bad followup question: “What's a clip?” Here's a good followup question: “OK, I read about clips and I can't see how to clip multiple objects without creating multiple clips.”
5. If You Can't Get An Answer
If you can't get an answer, please don't take it personally that we don't feel we can help you. Sometimes the members of the asked group may simply not know the answer. No response is not the same as being ignored, though admittedly it's hard to spot the difference from outside.
In general, simply re-posting your question is a bad idea. This will be seen as pointlessly annoying. Have patience: the person with your answer may be in a different time-zone and asleep. Or it may be that your question wasn't well-formed to begin with.
How To Answer Questions in a Helpful Way
Be gentle. Problem-related stress can make people seem rude or stupid even when they're not.
Reply to a first offender in a private message. There is no need of public humiliation for someone who may have made an honest mistake. A real newbie may not know how to search archives or where the FAQ is stored or posted.
If you don't know for sure, say so! A wrong but authoritative-sounding answer is worse than none at all. Don't point anyone down a wrong path simply because it's fun to sound like an expert. Be humble and honest; set a good example for both the querent and your peers.
Ask probing questions to elicit more details. If you're good at this, the querent will learn something — and so might you. Try to turn the bad question into a good one; remember we were all newbies once.
While muttering RTFM is sometimes justified when replying to someone who is just a lazy slob, a pointer to documentation (even if it's just a suggestion to google for a key phrase) is better.
If you're going to answer the question at all, give good value. Don't suggest kludgy workarounds when somebody is using the wrong tool or approach. Suggest good tools. Reframe the question.
If you did research to answer the question, demonstrate your skills rather than writing as though you pulled the answer out of your butt. Answering one good question is like feeding a hungry person one meal, but teaching them research skills by example is showing them how to grow food for a lifetime.