Please read before posting.

[Rice_King]

Ask Questions The Smart Way -- get the most "bang for your buck" in this forum

1. Use meaningful, specific subject headers

• The subject header is your golden opportunity to attract qualified experts' attention. Don't waste it on babble like “Please help me” (let alone “PLEASE HELP ME!!!!”; messages with subjects like that get discarded by reflex). Don't try to impress us with the depth of your anguish; use the space for a super-concise problem description instead.
  
• Don't be vague with titles like, "Internet Connection" or "Boot Problem." Vague titles will not help you get the assistance you're looking for.
  

One good convention for subject headers, used by many tech support organizations, is “object - deviation”. The “object” part specifies what thing or group of things is having a problem, and the “deviation” part describes the deviation from expected behavior.

Stupid: HELP! Video doesn't work properly on my laptop!

Smart: X.org 6.8.1 misshapen mouse cursor, Fooware MV1005 vid. chipset

Smarter: X.org 6.8.1 mouse cursor on Fooware MV1005 vid. chipset - is misshapen

A helper who sees the result can immediately understand what it is that you are having a problem with and the problem you are having, at a glance.

More generally, imagine looking at the index of an archive of questions, with just the subject lines showing. Make your subject line reflect your question well enough that the next guy searching the archive with a question similar to yours will be able to follow the thread to an answer rather than posting the question again.

2. Before You Ask

Before asking a technical question, do the following:

• Try to find an answer by searching the archives of the forum
  
• Try to find an answer by searching the Web.
  
• Try to find an answer by reading the manual.
  
• Try to find an answer by reading a FAQ.
  
• Try to find an answer by inspection or experimentation.
  

3. Write in clear, grammatical, correctly-spelled language

Spend the extra effort to polish your language. It doesn't have to be stiff or formal but it has to be precise; there has to be some indication that you're thinking and paying attention. A benefit of using proper spelling helps the next guy searching the archive with a question similar to yours.

4. 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 possibly relevant recent changes in your computer or software configuration.
  

5. Describe the problem's symptoms, not your guesses

It's not useful to tell the forum 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. If you feel it's important to state your guess, clearly label it as such and describe why that answer isn't working for you.

6. Describe your problem's symptoms in chronological order

The clues most useful 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 blowup.

7. Describe the goal, not the step

If you are trying to find out how to do something (as opposed to reporting a bug), begin by describing the goal. Only then describe the particular step towards it that you are blocked on.

Often, people who need technical help have a high-level goal in mind and get stuck on what they think is one particular path towards the goal. They come for help with the step, but don't realize that the path is wrong. It can take substantial effort to get past this.

Stupid: How do I get the color-picker on the FooDraw program to take a hexadecimal RGB value?

Smart: I'm trying to replace the color table on an image with values of my choosing. Right now the only way I can see to do this is by editing each table slot, but I can't get FooDraw's color picker to take a hexadecimal RGB value.

The second version of the question is smart. It allows an answer that suggests a tool better suited to the task.

8. Don't (ask people to) reply by private e-mail

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, helpers 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 ill-formed or obvious to be interesting to others.

9. Follow up with a brief note on the solution

The reply should be to the thread started by the original question posting, and should have ‘FIXED’, ‘RESOLVED’ in the post.