Andrea W Jans

Smarter Questions

02 Sep 2023

Questions

The Rules

How to ask questions the smart way, by Eric Raymond, lays out rules for getting your questions answered when you seek help via email, in a newsgroup, or in forums. These include such things as doing your homework beforehand by searching the archives of the forum and searching the web. Nothing upsets the forum denizens more than getting asked the same question over and over again or a question whose answer can easily be found on the web. Read the Manual or FAQ if there is one, and experiment first.

When you are ready to ask your question, make sure the channel you choose is the correct channel for your question. Also, ensure that the technical level of the channel is right for your question. Finally, do not cross-post your question to too many channels. Violating these rules will get you ignored at the least or the victim of a flame response at the worst.

Smart Example

It did not take me long searching on Stack Overflow to find an excellent example of a Smart Question. Improve INSERT-per-second performance of SQLite laid out their question first, and then showed 10 different ways they had tried to solve the performance problem. The post received 12 quality answers, quite a few comments, and 3344 up-votes. The person posting the question, ended their post with “I’d gladly take suggestions for other scenarios to try… And will be compiling similar data for SELECT queries soon.” This shows willingness to learn and contribute to the community.

Not So Smart Example

It also did not take long to find a bad example of how to post a question. Files that won’t compile in IPhone project asked three questions:

  1. Could it be that some external compile script was being used previously instead of the one configured in XCode?
  2. Could it be that these files won’t compile for the iPhone Simulator, but would compile for a real device?
  3. Do you know what these files (render.c, sweep.c and tess.c) are for?

The first question could only be answered by someone with access to the project source files. The second was answered by the original poster, and the third simply requires reading the source code itself. The comments were not outright helpful, and the post got 0 up-votes. The person responsible for this post did not try to help themselves before asking the questions.