This isn't really a FAQ per say, but I thought it was a good enough read to post it here. This was taken from the Smoothwall FAQ section and basically covers some simple etiquette when asking for help. You may or may not agree with all of this, but I think the author makes some very valid points.....
Before You Ask
Before asking a technical question by email, or in a
newsgroup, or on a web site chat board, do the following:
1. Try to find an answer by reading the manual.
2. Try to find an answer by reading a FAQ.
3. Try to find an answer by searching the Web.
4. Try to find an answer by asking a skilled friend.
When you ask your question, display the fact that you have
done these things first; this will help establish that you're not
being a lazy sponge and wasting peoples' time. Better yet,
display what you have learned from doing these things. We
like answering questions for people who have demonstrated
that they can learn from the answers.
Prepare your question. Think it through. Hasty-sounding
questions get hasty answers, or none at all. The more you do
to demonstrate that you have put thought and effort into
solving your problem before asking for help, the more likely
you are to actually get help.
Beware of asking the wrong question. If you ask one that is
based on faulty assumptions, J. Random Hacker is quite
likely to reply with a uselessly literal answer while thinking
"Stupid question...", and hoping that the experience of
getting what you asked for rather than what you needed will
teach you a lesson.
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 question that is
substantial, interesting, and thought-provoking, one that
implicitly contributes to the experience of the community
rather than merely passively demanding knowledge from
others.
On the other hand, making it clear that you are able and
willing to help in the process of developing the solution is a
very good start. "Can someone provide a pointer?", "What is
my example missing?" and "Is there a site I should have
checked?" are more likely to get answered than "Please post
the exact procedure I should use." because you're making it
clear that you're truly willing to complete the process if
someone can simply point you in the right direction.
When You Ask
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 is off topic
post a very elementary question to a forum where
advanced technical questions are expected, or viceversa
cross-post to too many different newsgroups
Hackers blow off questions that are inappropriately targeted
in order to try to protect their communications channels from
being drowned in irrelevance. You don't want this to happen
to you.
In general, questions to a well-selected public forum are
more likely to get useful answers than equivalent questions
to a private one. There are multiple reasons for this. One is
simply the size of the pool of potential respondents. Another
is the size of the audience; hackers would rather answer
questions that educate a lot of people than questions, which
only serve a few.
Write in clear, grammatical, correctly-spelled language
We've found by experience that people who are careless and
sloppy writers are usually also careless and sloppy at
thinking and coding (often enough to bet on, anyway).
Answering questions for careless and sloppy thinkers is not
rewarding; we'd rather spend our time elsewhere.
So expressing your question clearly and well is important. If
you can't be bothered to do that, we can't be bothered to pay
attention. Spend the extra effort to polish your language. It
doesn't have to be stiff or formal - in fact, hacker culture
values informal, slangy and humorous language used with
precision. But it has to be precise; there has to be some
indication that you're thinking and paying attention.
Spell correctly. Don't confuse "its" with "it's" or "loose" with
"lose". Don't TYPE IN ALL CAPS, this is read as shouting
and considered rude. If you write like a semi-literate boob,
you will probably be ignored. Writing like a l33t script
kiddie hax0r is the absolute kiss of death and guarantees you
will receive nothing but stony silence (or, at best, a heaping
helping of scorn and sarcasm) in return.
If you are asking questions in a forum that does not use your
native language, you will get a limited amount of slack for
spelling and grammar errors, but no extra slack at all for
laziness (and yes, we can usually spot that difference). Also,
unless you know what your respondent's languages are, write
in English. Busy hackers tend to simply flush questions in
languages they don't understand, and English is the working
language of the net. By writing in English you minimise
your chances that your question will be discarded unread.
Send questions in formats that are easy to understand
If you make your question artificially hard to read, it is more
likely to be passed over in favour of one that isn't. So:
Send plain text mail, not HTML.
Don't send mail in which entire paragraphs are single
multiply-wrapped lines. (This makes it too difficult to
reply to just part of the message.)
Don't send MIME Quoted-Printable encoding either;
all those =20 glyphs scattered through the text are ugly
and distracting.
Never, ever expect hackers to be able to read closed
proprietary document formats like Microsoft Word.
Most hackers react to these about as well as you would
to having a pile of steaming pig manure dumped on
your doorstep.
If you're sending mail from a Windows machine, turn
off Microsoft's stupid "Smart Quotes" feature. This is
so you avoid sprinkling garbage characters through
your mail.
Use meaningful, specific subject headers
On mailing lists or newsgroups, the subject header 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!!!!"). Don't
try to impress us with the depth of your anguish; use the
space for a super-concise problem description instead.
Stupid:
HELP! Video doesn't work properly on my laptop!
Smart:
XFree86 4.1 misshapen mouse cursor, Fooware
MV1005 vid. chipset
Be precise and informative about your problem
Describe the symptoms of your problem or bug
carefully and clearly.
Describe the environment in which it occurs (machine,
OS, application, whatever).
Describe the research you did to try and understand
the problem before you asked the question.
Describe the diagnostic steps you took to try and pin
down the problem yourself before you asked the
question.
Describe any recent changes in your computer or
software configuration that might be relevant.
Do the best you can to anticipate the questions a hacker will
ask, and to answer them in advance in your request for help.
Simon Tatham has written an excellent essay entitled How
to Report Bugs Effectively which can be found at
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html. I
strongly recommend that you read it.
Volume is not precision
You need to be precise and informative. This end is not
served by simply dumping huge volumes of code or data into
a help request. If you have a large, complicated test case that
is breaking a program, try to trim it and make it as small as
possible.
This is useful for at least three reasons. One: being seen to
invest effort in simplifying the question makes it more likely
that you'll get an answer, Two: simplifying the question
makes it more likely you'll get a useful answer. Three: In the
process of refining your bug report, you may develop a fix or
workaround yourself.
Describe the problem's symptoms, not your guesses
It's not useful to tell hackers what you think is causing your
problem. (If your diagnostic theories were such hot stuff,
would you be consulting others for help?) So, make sure
you're telling them the raw symptoms of what goes wrong,
rather than your interpretations and theories. Let them do the
interpretation and diagnosis.
Stupid:
I'm getting back-to-back SIG11 errors on kernel
compiles, and suspect a hairline crack on one of the
motherboard traces. What's the best way to check for
those?
Smart:
My home-built K6/233 on an FIC-PA2007
motherboard (VIA Apollo VP2 chipset) with 256MB
Corsair PC133 SDRAM starts getting frequent SIG11
errors about 20 minutes after power-on during the
course of kernel compiles, but never in the first 20
minutes. Rebooting doesn't restart the clock, but
powering down overnight does. Swapping out all RAM
didn't help. The relevant part of a typical compile
session log follows.
Describe your problem's symptoms in chronological
order
The most useful clues in figuring out something that went
wrong often lie in the events immediately prior. So, your
account should describe precisely what you did, and what
the machine did, leading up to the blow up. In the case of
command-line processes, having a session log (e.g., using
the script utility) and quoting the relevant twenty or so lines
is very useful.
If the program that blew up on you has diagnostic options
(such as -v for verbose), try to think carefully about selecting
options that will add useful debugging information to the
transcript.
If your account ends up being long (more than about four
paragraphs), it might be useful to succinctly state the
problem up top, then follow with the chronological tale. That
way, hackers will know what to watch for in reading your
account.
Don't ask people to reply by private email
Hackers believe 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, they get some
of their reward for being respondents from being seen to be
competent and knowledgeable by their peers.
When you ask for a private reply, you are disrupting both the
process and the reward. Don't do this. It's the respondent's
choice whether to reply privately, and if he does, it's usually
because he thinks the question is too obvious or ill formed to
be interesting to others.
There is one limited exception to this rule. If you think the
question is such that you are likely to get a lot of answers
that are all pretty similar, then the magic words are "email
me and I'll summarise the answers for the group". It is
courteous to try and save the mailing list or newsgroup a
flood of substantially identical postings, but you have to
keep the promise to summarise.
Prune pointless queries
Resist the temptation to close your request for help with
semantically-null questions like "Can anyone help me?" or
"Is there an answer?" First: if you've written your problem
description halfway competently, such tacked-on questions
are at best superfluous. Second: because they are
superfluous, hackers find them annoying, and are likely to
return logically impeccable but dismissive answers like
"Yes, you can be helped" and "No, there is no help for you."
Courtesy never hurts, and sometimes helps
Be courteous. Use "Please" and "Thanks in advance". Make
it clear that you appreciate the time people spend helping
you for free.
To be honest, this isn't as important as (and cannot substitute
for) being grammatical, clear, precise and descriptive,
avoiding proprietary formats etc.; hackers in general would
rather get somewhat brusque but technically sharp bug
reports than polite vagueness. (If this puzzles you, remember
that we value a question by what it teaches us.)
However, if you've got your technical ducks in a row,
politeness does increase your chances of getting a useful
answer.
Follow up with a brief note on the solution
Send a note after the problem has been solved to all who
helped you; let them know how it came out and thank them
again for their help. If the problem attracted general interest
in a mailing list or newsgroup, it's appropriate to post the
follow-up there.
Your follow-up doesn't have to be long and involved; a
simple "Howdy - it was a failed network cable! Thanks,
everyone. - Bill" would be better than nothing. In fact, a
short and sweet summary is better than a long dissertation
unless the solution has real technical depth.
Besides being courteous and informative, this sort of followup
helps everybody who assisted feel a satisfying sense of
closure about the problem. If you are not a techie or hacker
yourself, trust us that this feeling is very important to the
gurus and experts you tapped for help. Problem narratives
that trail off into unresolved nothingness are frustrating
things; hackers itch to see them resolved. The good karma
that scratching that itch earns you will be very, very helpful
to you next time you need to pose a question.
How to Interpret Answers
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*cking Manual. He 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*cking Web. He is almost certainly right. Go
search it.
Often, the person sending either of these replies has the
manual or the web page with the information you need open,
and is looking at it as he 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; by hacker standards, he is
showing you a rough kind of respect simply by not ignoring
you. You should instead thank him for his grandmotherly
kindness.
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. If you need to ask for clarification, exhibit what you
have learned.
For example, suppose I tell you: "It sounds like you've got a
stuck zentry; you'll need to clear it." Then:
Here's a bad follow-up question:
"What's a zentry?"
Here's a good follow up question:
"OK, I read the man page and zentries are only
mentioned under the -z and -p switches. Neither of
them says anything about clearing zentries. Is it one of
these or am I missing something here?"
Dealing with rudeness
Much of what looks like rudeness in hacker circles is not
intended to give offence. Rather, it's the product of the
direct, cut-through-the-bullshit communications style that is
natural to people who are more concerned about solving
problems than making others feel warm and fuzzy.
When you perceive rudeness, try to react calmly. If someone
is really acting out, it is very likely that a senior person on
the list or newsgroup or forum will call him or her on it. If
that doesn't happen and you lose your temper, it is likely that
the person you lose it at was behaving within the hacker
community's norms and you will be considered at fault. This
will hurt your chances of getting the information or help you
want.
On the other hand, you will occasionally run across rudeness
and posturing that is quite gratuitous. The flip-side of the
above is that it is acceptable form to slam real offenders
quite hard, dissecting their misbehaviour with a sharp verbal
scalpel. Be very, very sure of your ground before you try
this, however. The line between correcting an incivility and
starting a pointless flame war is thin enough that hackers
themselves not infrequently blunder across it; if you are a
newbie or an outsider, your chances of avoiding such a
blunder are low. If you're after information rather than
entertainment, it's better to keep your fingers off the
keyboard than to risk this.
(Some people assert that many hackers have a mild form of
autism or Asperger's Syndrome, and are actually missing
some of the brain circuitry that lubricates `normal' human
social interaction. This may or may not be true. If you are
not a hacker yourself, it may help you cope if you think of us
as brain-damaged. Go ahead. We won't care; we like being
whatever it is we are, and generally have a healthy
scepticism about clinical labels.)
In the next section, we'll talk about a different issue; the kind
of `rudeness' you'll see when you misbehave.
On Not Reacting Like A Loser
Odds are, you'll screw up a few times, on hacker community
forums -- in ways detailed in this article, or similar. And
you'll be told exactly how you screwed up, possibly with
colourful asides. In public.
When this happens, the worst thing you can do is whine
about the experience, claim to have been verbally assaulted,
demand apologies, scream, hold your breath, threaten
lawsuits, complain to people's employers, leave the toilet
seat up, etc. Instead, here's what you do:
Get over it. It's normal. In fact, it's healthy and appropriate.
Community standards do not maintain themselves: They're
maintained by people actively applying them, visibly, in
public. Don't whine that all criticism should have been
conveyed via private mail: That's not how it works. Nor is it
useful to insist you've been personally insulted when
someone comments that one of your claims was wrong, or
that his views differ. Those are loser attitudes.
There have been hacker forums where, out of some
misguided sense of hyper-courtesy, participants are banned
from posting any fault-finding with another's posts, and told
"Don't say anything if you're unwilling to help the user." The
resulting departure of clueful participants to elsewhere
causes them to descend into meaningless babble and become
useless as technical forums.
Exaggeratedly "friendly" (in that fashion) or useful: Pick
one.
Remember: When that hacker tells you that you've screwed
up, and (no matter how gruffly) tells you not to do it again,
he's acting out of concern for (1) you and (2) his community.
It would be much easier for him to ignore you and filter you
out of his life. If you can't manage to be grateful, at least
have a little dignity, don't whine, and don't expect to be
treated like a fragile doll just because you're a newcomer
with a theatrically hypersensitive soul and delusions of
entitlement.
Questions Not To Ask
Here are some classic stupid questions, and what hackers are
thinking when they don't answer them.
Q: Where can I find program X?
A: The same place I'd find it, fool -- at the other end of
a web search. Ghod, doesn't everybody know how to
use Google yet?
Q: My {program, configuration, SQL statement}
doesn't work
A: This is not a question, and I'm not interested in
playing Twenty Questions to pry your actual
question out of you - I have better things to do. On
seeing something like this, my reaction is normally
of one of the following:
do you have anything else to add to that?
oh, that's too bad, I hope you get it fixed.
and this has exactly what to do with me?
Q: I'm having problems with my Windows machine.
Can you help?
A: Yes. Throw out that Microsoft trash and install
Linux.
Q: I'm having problems installing Linux or X. Can you
help?
A: No. I'd need hands-on access to your machine to
troubleshoot this. Go ask your local Linux user
group for hands-on help. (You can find a list of user
groups here:
http://www.linux.org/groups/index.html.
Q: How can I crack root/steal channel-ops
privileges/read someone's email?
A: You're a lowlife for wanting to do such things and a
moron for asking a hacker to help you.
Good and Bad Questions
Finally, I'm going to illustrate how to ask questions in a
smart way by example; pairs of questions about the same
problem, one asked in a stupid way and one in a smart way.
Stupid: Where can I find out stuff about the Foonly
Flurbamatic?
This question just begs for "STFW" as a reply.
Smart: I used Google to try to find "Foonly
Flurbamatic 2600" on the Web, but I got no
useful hits. Does anyone know where I can
find programming information on this device?
This one has already SFTWed, and sounds like
he might have a real problem.
Stupid: I can't get the code from project foo to
compile. Why is it broken?
He assumes that somebody else screwed up. Arrogant
of him.
Smart: The code from project foo doesn't compile
under Nulix version 6.2. I've read the FAQ, but
it doesn't have anything in it about Nulixrelated
problems. Here's a transcript of my
compilation attempt; is it something I did?
He's specified the environment, he's read the FAQ, he's
showing the error, and he's not assuming his problems
are someone else's fault. This guy might be worth some
attention.
Stupid: I'm having problems with my motherboard.
Can anybody help?
J. Random Hacker's response to this is likely to be
"Right. Do you need burping and diapering, too?"
followed by a punch of the delete key.
Smart: I tried X, Y, and Z on the S2464 motherboard.
When that didn't work, I tried A, B, and C.
Note the curious symptom when I tried C.
Obviously the florbish is grommicking, but the
results aren't what one might expect. What are
the usual causes of grommicking on MP
motherboards? Anybody got ideas for more
tests I can run to pin down the problem?
This person, on the other hand, seems worthy of an
answer. He has exhibited problem-solving intelligence
rather than waiting for an answer to drop from on high.
In the last question, notice the subtle but important
difference between demanding "Give me an answer" and
"Please help me figure out what additional diagnostics I can
run to achieve enlightenment."
In fact, the form of that last question is closely based on a
real incident that happened in August 2001 on the linuxkernel
mailing list. I (Eric) was the one asking the question
that time. I was seeing mysterious lockups on a Tyan S2464
motherboard. The list members supplied the critical
information I needed to solve them.
By asking the question in the way I did, I gave people
something to chew on; I made it easy and attractive for them
to get involved. I demonstrated respect for my peers' ability
and invited them to consult with me as a peer. I also
demonstrated respect for the value of their time by telling
them the blind alleys I had already run down.
Afterwards, when I thanked everyone and remarked how
well the process had worked, an lkml member observed that
he thought it had worked not because I'm a "name" on that
list, but because I asked the question in the proper form.
We hackers are in some ways a very ruthless meritocracy;
I'm certain he was right, and that if I had behaved like a
sponge I would have been flamed or ignored no matter who I
was. His suggestion that I write up the whole incident as an
instruction to others led directly to the composition of this
guide.
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.
There are other sources of help you can go to, often sources
better adapted to a novice's needs.
There are many online and local user groups who are
enthusiasts about the software, even though they may never
have written any software themselves. These groups often
form so that people can help each other and help new users.
There are also plenty of commercial companies you can
contract with for help, both large and small (Red Hat and
LinuxCare are two of the best known; there are many
others). Don't be dismayed at the idea of having to pay for a
bit of help! After all, if your car engine blows a head gasket,
chances are, you will take it to a repair shop and pay to get it
fixed. Even if the software didn't cost you anything, you
can't expect that support will always come for free.
For popular software like Linux, there are at least 10000
users per developer. It's just not possible for one person to
handle the support calls from over 10000 users. Remember
that even if you have to pay for support, you are still paying
much less than if you had to buy the software as well (and
support for closed-source software is usually more expensive
and less competent than support for open-source software).