Introduction
In the world of hackers, 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 that is likely
to get you a satisfactory answer.
Now that use of open source has become widespread, you can
often get answers from other, more experienced users, rather than
hackers. This is a Good Thing; users tend to be just a little bit more
tolerant of the kind of failures newbies often have. Still, treating
experienced users like hackers in the ways we recommend here will
generally be the most effective way to get useful answers out of them,
too.
The first thing to understand is that hackers 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.
Among hackers, “Good question!” is a strong and sincere
compliment.
Despite this, hackers have a reputation for meeting simple
questions with what looks like hostility or arrogance. It sometimes
looks like we're reflexively rude to newbies and the ignorant. But
this isn't really true.
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 — they take without
giving back, they waste time we could have spent on another question
more interesting and another person more worthy of an answer. We call
people like this “losers” (and for historical reasons we
sometimes spell it “lusers”).
We realize that there are many people who just want to use the
software we write, and have no interest in learning
technical details. For most people, a computer is merely a tool, a means to an
end; they have more important things to do and lives to live. We
acknowledge that, and don't expect everyone to take an interest in the
technical matters that fascinate us. Nevertheless, our style of
answering questions is tuned for people who do
take such an interest and are willing to be active participants in
problem-solving. That's not going to change. Nor should it; if it
did, we would become less effective at the things we do best.
We're (largely) volunteers. We take time out of busy lives to
answer questions, and at times we're overwhelmed with them. So we
filter ruthlessly. In particular, we throw away questions from people
who appear to be losers in order to spend our question-answering time
more efficiently, on winners.
If you find this attitude obnoxious, condescending, or arrogant,
check your assumptions. We're not asking you to genuflect to us
— in fact, most of us would love nothing more than to deal with
you as an equal and welcome you into our culture, if you put in the
effort required to make that possible. But it's simply not efficient
for us to try to help people who are not willing to help
themselves. It's OK to be ignorant; it's not OK to play stupid.
So, 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.
If you decide to come to us for help, you don't want to be one
of the losers. You don't want to seem like one, either. The best way
to get a rapid and responsive answer is to ask it like a person with
smarts, confidence, and clues who just happens to need help on one
em.
(Improvements to this guide are welcome. You can mail
suggestions to esr@thyrsus.com. Note however
that this document is not intended to be a general guide to netiquette, and I
will generally reject suggestions that are not specifically related to
eliciting useful answers in a technical forum.)
See all text here: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#intro