 A common scenario that you see play out online is people going to technical forms and then asking questions and then they get trashed in these forms because they don't ask questions in the responsible, smart kind of way. One of the things when you go to a technical form to get help for computers or software, programming languages, whatever it happens to be, you go and ask people for help and you post a question, there are some rules, some guidelines that most people would assume are common sense, but one of the things I have learned in my years is that common sense is rather uncommon, especially online. So today, let's discuss how to ask questions the smart way. I think the best guide to how to ask questions the smart way is this particular essay that was written by Eric S. Raymond. Eric S. Raymond is a huge figure in the free and open source community. Eric S. Raymond actually is one of the originators of the term open source. Eric Raymond famously wrote the book The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which talks a lot about the open source model of software development. So he has this essay here, how to ask questions the smart way. And it is a very lengthy document. I'm not obviously going to read the whole thing here on camera, but I do want to hit some of the high points. So let's start with before you ask a question before asking a technical question by email, news group, mailing list, web forums, IRC, chat rooms, whatever it happens to be. Number one, try to find the answer by searching the archives of the form or the mailing list that you plan to post to. So all of these, especially internet bulletin board systems and forums and things like that have a way to search past posts, past threads. Same thing on Reddit and places like that, right? Actually do a search for your question before you post the question. Chances are you're not the first person to ask that question, and it's probably already been answered before. Next, number two, try to find the answer by searching the web. Nine times out of 10, whatever it is you're asking can be answered immediately through a Google search. And I am not kidding. I have had people ask questions that literally the very first result of them asking the question to Google is the answer they want. But they, for some reason, are too lazy to type all of that into Google instead they want to type it onto a bulletin board system or a web forum and things like that. I've never understood that. I really don't get the logic behind people that do that. Number three, try to find the answer by reading the manual. Most pieces of software, especially, have a manual associated with it, a man page. If you're running a UNIX-like operating system like Linux, right, run the man page and actually look for technical help in the manual. Or it's a Linux distribution, for example. They all have wikis, well, not all of them, but many of them have wikis that you can read to find common answers. Number four, try to find the answer by reading a FAQ. Most web presences, right, websites, forums, and things like that have a FAQ. Frequently asked questions because they get tired of people asking the same question a hundred, a thousand, 10,000 different times, right? So they have the most common questions typically posted in a FAQ. Read that before you ask your question. Number five, try to find the answer by inspection or experimentation. Now, I think this is a fabulous recommendation, and it's one that so many people just don't do, is have you actually tried to do anything to solve your own problem? You have this question, and surely you have some kind of hypothesis, right, that, you know, will this solve my problem? Maybe this other thing might solve my problem. Have you tried any of these possible solutions that you've probably come up with in your head? Or do you want me to do it for you, you know, the person you're asking online? What have you actually done to try to solve your problem yourself? If you haven't done anything to try to solve that problem yourself before asking me to help you solve it, I'm gonna be less likely to want to help you out. Number six, try to find an answer by asking a skilled friend. So you have a person in real life, a friend or a family member that is an expert and whatever it is that you're going to the internet and asking random people to help you out with. You know, try your real life friends first before asking strangers to help you out. And number seven is one that won't apply to all scenarios, but in the case where you're a programmer, number seven, try to find the answer by reading the source code. So if you've got some question about a particular piece of software, for example, what does this software do? You know, what's this functionality, yada, yada, yada? Can you actually read the programming language or the scripting language that it's written in? If you can, have you actually tried to just go read the source code and see if you can quickly answer that question yourself? So having covered things you should do before you ask, let's talk about when you ask your question. So people are going to be less likely to help you out if you do any of the following. If you post your question to a forum where it's off topic, chances are no one's going to respond to you. Chances are they're either just gonna delete your question, ban you, or just ignore you altogether. And also never post a very elementary question to a forum where advanced technical questions are expected or vice versa. So if this is a really technical forum about, I don't know, a certain programming language, you know, it's a real deep dense kind of topic for a forum, don't go there and ask really beginner level questions because you really don't belong there anyway. And the same thing with really newbie beginner forums, don't go there and ask a really detailed technical question where that forum is really for people on a much more basic level than where you're already at. Also never cross post to too many different news groups, and of course he's talking about use net news groups, which were very popular thing, you know, 20 years ago. Nowadays we would say don't cross post to very many different forums, subreddit, slings like that. If you try to ask your question in a million different places, it just comes across as just spam. And once again, people are just going to ignore those kinds of messages. And finally, he goes on to say that if you post a personal email to somebody who is neither an acquaintance of yours, nor personally responsible for solving your problem, you're not likely to get an answer either. This is a problem that most people are not gonna run into these days because most people are not gonna share personal emails, names, addresses, phone numbers, things like that. This was when the internet was a much more smaller place when this was originally written. But the thing is, if you're going to a forum, a big web forum, mailing list, whatever it happens to be asking for technical help, it should never be just for you. Don't tell people to email you a response because that doesn't solve the problem for the greater community at large. It needs to be posted, your responses and their answers and everything need to all be public information. That way it helps solve the problem for the next guy so that you're actually paying it forward. Now let's talk about support forum titles, thread titles, Reddit titles, mailing list titles. He goes on to say, use meaningful specific subject headers. So he gives you three examples, stupid, smart and smarter. So the stupid example is obvious. Help, all caps, exclamation. Video doesn't work properly on my laptop. That is so general, generic. No one has any idea what the question is really about or what the possible solution could be just from that title. A smart and smarter way is to actually include, for example, XORG 6.8.1. So we're already saying it's XORG error. Here's the version. The error is misshapenmousecursorfuwaremv1005vid.chipset. That's a much more descriptive title so already somebody that maybe actually has had that problem before and knows what the answer is are immediately gonna spot your thread title and you're much more likely to get that person to respond to you to help you out where the person who knew the answer to this particular specific problem has no idea what you're asking with the stupid title, help. Video doesn't work properly on my laptop. Also be sure to write in clear, grammatical, correctly spelled language. I've talked about this before on a separate video about just general, netiquette, how to act on the internet so I won't cover this here but really I wanted to focus mainly on how to ask questions in a technical form which isn't about netiquette at all but netiquette still applies so don't type everything in all caps. Use punctuation, right? If you're one of those people that doesn't put a period anywhere in a paragraph yet nobody's gonna respond to that and that's just the nature of the internet. Another interesting point to bring up is volume is not precision so be precise with your information. Don't write a lengthy novel about your problem if you don't really understand what the problem is, right? So a lot of people will include just this gigantic bunch of word salads sometimes when they're posting on the internet and they will write, again, like 10 paragraphs and they won't say anything, right? It's just, it's pointless drivel. So whatever it is you're trying to say spit it out in as few and as specific and precise words as possible. Also make sure you approach the form you're asking the question in a responsible way so he mentions groveling is not a substitute for doing your homework so don't beg for an answer, never demand an answer, right? Just be courteous, be respectful to everybody online and a final point I wanna mention here on camera is this point here, don't post homework questions. So this is something especially on very large technical forms like all of the various stack exchange forms out there. They are very anti doing your homework for you. So if you are in school, high school, college whatever it happens to be and you have some assignment some programming assignment or whatever it happens to be some of the stack exchanges are also about various flavors of science and philosophy and things like that never bring your homework questions to those forms because you're basically asking people to help you cheat, to do your homework and no one wants to do that. That is not a good use of their time and to be honest, it's not a good use of your time if you are not going to bother actually learning the subject matter of your classes then honestly you should probably not be in school. So those were just a few of the high points of this particular essay, How to Ask Questions the Smart Way by Eric S. Raymond. I'm gonna link to the entire essay because it is a very lengthy read and I do think it's worth a read. It's not going to take you like all day to read but it's probably take you a good 15, 20 minutes or so to actually read the entire document yourself but I do think it will give some people especially those of you that are younger that you weren't around especially in the early days of the internet where a lot of these rules were commonplace they were expected of you. And this is really the cause of a lot of this conflict online and these technical forms is because the people that ask questions in a stupid way have never been exposed to the rules of the internet essentially where the old school neckbeards they know these rules they were around when these rules were written decades ago and they're typically the ones on these forums that are helping out the people that ask questions. So if you ask a stupid question they a lot of times they don't realize you were never told these rules they just think you know the rules and for whatever reason you're purposely there to waste their time so they're gonna be snarky and arrogant and elitist they're gonna tell you to RTFM or GFY or whatever it happens to be and that is the reason it's because not enough of us actually know the rules that we're all expected to know to be on those forms. Now before I go I need to thank a few special people I need to thank the producers of this episode and of course I'm talking about Gabe James Matt Maxim, Mitchel Paul West, why you bold homie Alex, Armored Dragon, Chuck Commander, Rangory Deliokai, George Lee, Marshall Lee, Nate Irion, Alexander Paul, Peace, Arch, and Vador, Polytech Realities for Less Red Profit, Roland, Steven Tools, Devler, and Willie. These guys, they're my has tiered patrons over on Patreon. They are the producers of this episode. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now these are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work and want to see more videos about Linux and free and open source software subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. Peace, guys. And never ask open-ended questions. They're just time sinks.