...making Linux just a little more fun!
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. -- Eric S. Raymond, "How To Ask Questions The Smart Way"
This document draws heavily on several sources, including Tad McClellan's Posting Guidelines for comp.lang.perl.misc and the Netiquette Guidelines RFC. How to Ask Smart Questions by Eric S. Raymond and Rick Moen is also strongly recommended as a general guide to getting good Net.answers.
General Info About The Gang
The Answer Gang is a group of volunteers at the Linux Gazette. It is the source of the Gazette's tech support columns, The Mailbag, 2-Cent Tips, and The Answer Gang. To gather relevant questions to respond to, we run an open mailing list where anyone is welcome to ask their Linux-related questions.
Each member of The Gang has a set
of Linux-relevant interests, skills, and abilities; whether you get an
answer or not depends on how well you engage those. There is no guarantee
that your question will be answered at all: however, interesting questions
of broad scope (i.e., those that would be of interest to a number of our
readers), especially presented by folks who are pleasant, polite, and have
a sense of humor are not likely to be ignored.
Be Warned: The answers themselves may range from friendly to
gruff and often contain sharp humor, horseplay, fluff, pedantry, and
pontification; the discussion spawned by your question may well wander
off-topic and possibly back on again - with all of this reflected in your
mailbox. Thin-skinned folks, those who expect "their answer" and nothing
else, and narrow-minded people are urged to take the appropriate
precautions. (Yellow helmets and fire- and bullet-proof underwear are
available in the shop just off the main lobby.)
BEFORE POSTING
Here's something you can do right away that will greatly increase your
chances of "winning the TAG lottery", even before you fire up your e-mail
software: prequalify your question by running it through the following
info-gauntlet. If it comes through without being answered, we'd be interested
in at least looking at this rare beast - and you'll gain status points
by telling us about having done this and the results you got.
Check your local resources:
POSTING TO TAG
Questions whose answers (from you) would give us enough to run with:
So - you've already done one of The Right Things by reading this document;
presumably, you've already done more than one Right Thing by working through
the preceding list. If you still haven't found an answer, go ahead and send your question to
The
Answer Gang - we'll be glad to hear from you!
Use the Web:
Check out the LG treasure trove:
The Linux Gazette has a rather obvious and clearly stated purpose;
our target readership is the Linux community. We may post humorous pieces,
or "spam slams", or other non-Linux content - but in general, that's not
what we do. We don't usually give out advice on cooking rhubarb, passing
tests in American history, or making your Wind*ws program work... actually,
we have done all of those in the past, but relying on it would be just
plain silly. Confine your questions to Linux-specific or Linux-related
content.
You have 40 precious characters of Subject in which to make your first
impression. Spend them indicating what problem we can expect to find in
your query. Don't waste them telling us about your experience level ("Guru",
"Newbie"...) Don't waste them pleading ("Please read", "Urgent", "HELP!!!"...)
Don't waste them on non-subjects ("Linux question", "Could I ask a question?"...)
Part of the beauty of Net forum dynamics is that you can contribute to
the community with your very first post! If your choice of subject leads
a fellow searcher to find the thread you are starting, then even asking
a question helps us all.
This is a "red flag" phrase, one that gives no useful information and
tends to annoy the people who are trying to help you. If you find yourself
writing it, pause and see if you can't describe what is not working without
saying "doesn't work". That is, describe how it is not what you want. Try
to explain the problem to another person using only words (i.e., don't
show it to them - just describe it.) If they can understand what you
mean, write down the explanation you used and send it to us!
When composing a reply, intersperse your comments following the
sections of quoted text that you're replying to. There's a good guide on
quoting in the
Quoting and Answering section of "How Do I Quote Correctly On Usenet?";
knowing how to do is a skill that will serve you not only here but in any
mailing list or Usenet forum.
(Heather Stern "The EditorGal"'s addendum, with modifications)
Too Much Info: Where you bought the computer and whether
you still have a receipt. What color the case is. Your passwords or anything
else you wouldn't discuss in the bookstore or at a picnic.
Not Enough Info: "So I plugged everything in but it doesn't
work."
What, exactly, did you plug in? Into what?
For a more complete treatment of this topic, see Simon Tatham's excellent
How
to Report Bugs Effectively.
What did you expect to happen?
What happened instead?
What were the exact error messages?
What have you changed since then?
Where does Linux come into the puzzle? (feel free to guess)
Which Linux distribution?
Which version of the problem software package (you did upgrade
to the latest one, right?) are you using?
Plain text is something that any mail program can read. Don't post
Word documents, PDFs, HTML, or MIME (a number of stupidly-designed e-mail
programs do this by default; here are the
instructions
for turning many of them off); your question will not be easily readable
if you do, and that often spells "delete". Binary attachments sent to The
Answer Gang are thrown into the trash basket without even a glance. Yes,
we are aware that MIME Quoted-Printable can be useful in preserving non-English
character sets, but mail to TAG in a language other than English is very
rare. Use it when it's necessary; avoid it otherwise.
Published answers benefit the entire community; this is what we do
here in TAG. If you have a "This is to be kept confidential" blurb in your
post, forget about having it answered: it just isn't going to happen. Don't
expect people to do one-on-one problem resolution unless you're willing
to pay for it. If your company automatically glues a "confidential" tag
to all your e-mail, either e-mail us from home or preface your question
with an explicit permission for us to publish. In fact, here's one you
can simply copy and paste:
(Heather Stern "The EditorGal"'s addendum) If you know that it includes
some sort of message about who it's intended for, you can make that more
clear. This example asks for anonymizing...
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I hereby give my explicit permission for the Linux Gazette to publish the
material in this e-mail, as well as all future responses or discussion that
result from it. This notice supersedes all other restrictions.
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The intended recipient of this message is the readership of the world wide
webzine "Linux Gazette". Any responses or discussion with the Answer Gang
or any LG editor may be published worldwide. Please don't reveal my last
name, email address, or company.
...This notice supersedes any and all other attached restrictions. Thanks!
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Note that we normally hide your company anyway, unless you are with a company
that helps maintain the application being discussed. But email addresses
are normally shown with Tips, in case the readers have any comments.
