synopsis
Why the Way You Ask Matters
In the world of hacking, your ability to get a useful, accurate, and quick answer often depends not on the severity of your question, but on how you ask it. In other words, know how to ask questions in order to actually get help. This guide is designed to help you learn the art of asking questions that will increase your odds of getting effective technical support.
Nowadays, with the boom in Open Source software, more and more users are not relying on official customer support, but rather seeking help from other users through mailing lists, forums, Issue areas, IRC, Discord, and other community channels. Fortunately, these communities are full of experienced, sharing people who are willing to provide almost "hacker-level" answers - sometimes even more expert than the developers. This is a good thing.
However, in order for these people to take you seriously, you must also show some basic literacy. The approach we recommend in this guide applies not only to the hacker community, but also to any tech community dominated by seasoned users. Your respect for other people's time and perceptions is the first step in getting help.
What is a "good question"?
Hackers love challenging questions, logical questions, and questions that stimulate their thinking. A question that sparks a deep technical discussion, reveals a blind spot in software design, or even leads to a tool-level improvement is not just a cry for help from you, but potentially a gift to the community as a whole. ** "Great question!" ** is one of the highest compliments we can give to others.
A well posed question can help others understand your system or code better, and may reveal omissions in documentation and design flaws. It's the kind of question that we're not only willing to answer, we enjoy answering.
Why don't we like "bad questions"?
The hacker community is often misinterpreted as "unfriendly to newbies", but the question is not whether you are a newbie or not, but whether you have put in enough effort.
We despise those who are not willing to use their brains, do not make any attempts, and reach out without searching. They come up and say "XX doesn't work, help me out" without even providing a clear description or contextual information. These people just want to ask for something and never consider feedback, summarizing, archiving or contributing. They waste everyone's time and we call them losers' or sometimes lusers' for humor.
Please remember that we are not professional customer service. We are people who volunteer our valuable time to maintain the community and share our knowledge because we love technology. We can receive dozens or even hundreds of questions every day, and it's impossible to answer them all. For the sake of efficiency and mental health, we have to prioritize our questions. Your questions will be taken seriously only if you behave like a WINNER.
We understand your role, but you need to understand our boundaries as well.
We know that most people use computers to do their jobs, not to obsess over technical details. They have other interests, careers and life goals, and don't want to invest too much time in studying the underlying principles. That's normal, and we fully accept that.
But it also means that if you don't want to solve the problem yourself, then you can get help by signing up for a commercial tech support service instead of trying to get free time from the hacker community.
We welcome all who are willing to learn, respect knowledge and time into our culture. Ignorance is not scary, and those willing to grow are always welcome. But if you don't want to think, or even refuse to learn, we won't force you, we just won't waste time on you either.
Want Answers? Then learn how to ask questions
You don't need to be an expert or pretend to know everything. You just need to show that you are thinking hard, observing phenomena, troubleshooting possibilities, and are willing to work with initiative. Your questions should be specific, clear, and organized; you should show what attempts you've made; and you should search to see if a similar problem has been solved before asking.
Act like a WINNER:** Be resourceful, confident, well-organized, possess basic logical thinking, and respect others' time**. Even if you're temporarily stuck in a bottleneck, the community will almost certainly be willing to help, as long as it's done in the right way.
ultimate
If you'd like to provide feedback or suggest improvements to this guide, we welcome that. However, please note that this is not a generic "netiquette" document, but rather a practical guide to effective questioning in the technical community. We don't usually accept suggestions that don't help us improve the quality of our questions.
You can send suggestions to:
Let's work together to build a more efficient, friendly, and supportive technical community.