How To Ask Questions The Smart Way

 
How To Ask Questions The Smart Way
Eric Steven Raymond
Thyrsus Enterprises
Rick Moen
    <rick@linuxmafia.com>
Copyright © 2001 Eric S. Raymond

Table of Contents

Translations
Disclaimer
Introduction
Before You Ask
When You Ask
Choose your forum carefully
Web and IRC forums directed towards newbies often give the

quickest response
As a second step, use project mailing lists
Use meaningful, specific subject headers
Make it easy to reply
Write in clear, grammatical, correctly-spelled language
Send questions in formats that are easy to understand
Be precise and informative about your problem
Volume is not precision
Don't claim that you have found a bug
Grovelling is not a substitute for doing your homework
Describe the problem's symptoms, not your guesses
Describe your problem's symptoms in chronological order
Describe the goal, not the step
Don't ask people to reply by private email
Be explicit about the question you have
Don't post homework questions
Prune pointless queries
Don't flag your question as Urgent, even if it is for you
Courtesy never hurts, and sometimes helps
Follow up with a brief note on the solution
How To Interpret Answers
RTFM and STFW: How To Tell You've Seriously Screwed Up
If you don't understand...
Dealing with rudeness
On Not Reacting Like A Loser
Questions Not To Ask
Good and Bad Questions
If You Can't Get An Answer
How To Answer Questions in a Helpful Way
Related Resources
Acknowledgements
Translations
Translations: Chinese Czech Danish Estonian French German

Hebrew Hungarian Italian Japanese Polish Russian Spanish

Swedish Turkish. If you want to copy, mirror, translate, or

excerpt this document, please see my copying policy.

Disclaimer
Many project websites link to this document in their sections

on how to get help. That's fine, it's the use we intended —

but if you are a webmaster creating such a link for your

project page, please display prominently near the link notice

that we are not a help desk for your project!

We have learned the hard way that without such a notice, we

will repeatedly be pestered by idiots who think that our

having published this document makes it our job to solve all

the world's technical problems.

If you are reading this document because you need help, and

you walk away with the impression you can get it directly from

the authors, you are one of the idiots in question. Don't ask

us questions. We'll just ignore you. We are here to show you

how to get help from people who actually know about the

software or hardware you are dealing with, but 99% of the time

that will not be us. Unless you know for certain that one of

the authors is an expert on what you are dealing with, leave

us alone and everybody will be happier.

Introduction
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.

Now that use of open source has become widespread, you can

often get answers from other, more experienced users, rather

than hackers. This is a Good Thing; users tend to be just a

little bit more tolerant of the kind of failures newbies often

have. Still, treating experienced users like hackers in the

ways we recommend here will generally be the most effective

way to get useful answers out of them, too.

The first thing to understand is that hackers actually like

hard problems and good, thought-provoking questions about

them. If we didn't, we wouldn't be here. If you give us an

interesting question to chew on we'll be grateful to you; good

questions are a stimulus and a gift. Good questions help us

develop our understanding, and often reveal problems we might

not have noticed or thought about otherwise. Among hackers, “

Good question!” is a strong and sincere compliment.

Despite this, hackers have a reputation for meeting simple

questions with what looks like hostility or arrogance. It

sometimes looks like we're reflexively rude to newbies and the

ignorant. But this isn't really true.

What we are, unapologetically, is hostile to people who seem

to be unwilling to think or to do their own homework before

asking questions. People like that are time sinks — they take

without giving back, they waste time we could have spent on

another question more interesting and another person more

worthy of an answer. We call people like this “losers” (and

for historical reasons we sometimes spell it “lusers”).

We realize that there are many people who just want to use the

software we write, and have no interest in learning technical

details. For most people, a computer is merely a tool, a means

to an end; they have more important things to do and lives to

live. We acknowledge that, and don't expect everyone to take

an interest in the technical matters that fascinate us.

Nevertheless, our style of answering questions is tuned for

people who do take such an interest and are willing to be

active participants in problem-solving. That's not going to

change. Nor should it; if it did, we would become less

effective at the things we do best.

We're (largely) volunteers. We take time out of busy lives to

answer questions, and at times we're overwhelmed with them. So

we filter ruthlessly. In particular, we throw away questions

from people who appear to be losers in order to spend our

question-answering time more efficiently, on winners.

If you find this attitude obnoxious, condescending, or

arrogant, check your assumptions. We're not asking you to

genuflect to us — in fact, most of us would love nothing more

than to deal with you as an equal and welcome you into our

culture, if you put in the effort required to make that

possible. But it's simply not efficient for us to try to help

people who are not willing to help themselves. It's OK to be

ignorant; it's not OK to play stupid.

So, while it isn't necessary to already be technically

competent to get attention from us, it is necessary to

demonstrate the kind of attitude that leads to competence —

alert, thoughtful, observant, willing to be an active partner

in developing a solution. If you can't live with this sort of

discrimination, we suggest you pay somebody for a commercial

support contract instead of asking hackers to personally

donate help to you.

If you decide to come to us for help, you don't want to be one

of the losers. You don't want to seem like one, either. The

best way to get a rapid and responsive answer is to ask it

like a person with smarts, confidence, and clues who just

happens to need help on one particular problem.

(Improvements to this guide are welcome. You can mail

suggestions to esr@thyrsus.com. Note however that this

document is not intended to be a general guide to netiquette,

and I will generally reject suggestions that are not

specifically related to eliciting useful answers in a

technical forum.)

Before You Ask
Before asking a technical question by email, or in a

newsgroup, or on a website chat board, do the following:

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.

Try to find an answer by asking a skilled friend.

If you are a programmer, try to find an answer by reading the

source code.

When you ask your question, display the fact that you have

done these things first; this will help establish that you're

not being a lazy sponge and wasting people's time. Better yet,

display what you have learned from doing these things. We like

answering questions for people who have demonstrated that they

can learn from the answers.

Use tactics like doing a Google search on the text of whatever

error message you get (and search Google groups as well as web

pages). This might well take you straight to fix documentation

or a mailing list thread that will answer your question. Even

if it doesn't, saying “I googled on the following phrase but

didn't get anything that looked useful” is a good thing to be

able to put in email or news postings requesting help.

Prepare your question. Think it through. Hasty-sounding

questions get hasty answers, or none at all. The more you do

to demonstrate that you have put thought and effort into

solving your problem before asking for help, the more likely

you are to actually get help.

Beware of asking the wrong question. If you ask one that is

based on faulty assumptions, J. Random Hacker is quite likely

to reply with a uselessly literal answer while thinking

“Stupid question...”, and hoping that the experience of

getting what you asked for rather than what you needed will

teach you a lesson.

Never assume you are entitled to an answer. You are not; you

aren't, after all, paying for the service. You will earn an

answer, if you earn it, by asking a question that is

substantial, interesting, and thought-provoking — one that

implicitly contributes to the experience of the community

rather than merely passively demanding knowledge from others.

On the other hand, making it clear that you are able and

willing to help in the process of developing the solution is a

very good start. “Would someone provide a pointer?”, “What

is my example missing?” and “What site should I have

checked?” are more likely to get answered than “Please post

the exact procedure I should use.” because you're making it

clear that you're truly willing to complete the process if

someone can simply point you in the right direction.

When You Ask
Choose your forum carefully
Be sensitive in choosing where you ask your question. You are

likely to be ignored, or written off as a loser, if you:

post your question to a forum where it is off topic

post a very elementary question to a forum where advanced

technical questions are expected, or vice-versa

cross-post to too many different newsgroups

post a personal email to somebody who is neither an

acquaintance of yours nor personally responsible for solving

your problem

Hackers blow off questions that are inappropriately targeted

in order to try to protect their communications channels from

being drowned in irrelevance. You don't want this to happen to

you.

The first step, therefore, is to find the right forum. Again,

Google and other web-searching methods are your friend. Use

them to find the project web page most closely associated with

the hardware or software that is giving you difficulties.

Usually it will have links to a FAQ (Frequently Asked

Questions) list, and to project mailing lists and their

archives. These mailing lists are the final places to go for

help, if your own efforts (including reading those FAQs you

found) do not find you a solution. The project page may also

describe a bug-reporting procedure, or have a link to one; if

so, follow it.

Shooting off an email to a person or forum which you are not

familiar with is risky at best. For example, do not assume

that the author of an informative web page wants to be your

free consultant. Do not make optimistic guesses about whether

your question will be welcome — if you are unsure, send it

elsewhere, or refrain from sending it at all.

When selecting a Web forum, newsgroup or mailing list, don't

trust the name by itself too far; look for a FAQ or charter to

verify that your question is on-topic. Read some of the back

traffic before posting so you'll get a feel for how things are

done there. In fact, it's a very good idea to do a keyword

search for words relating to your problem on the newsgroup or

mailing list archives before you post. It may find you an

answer, and if not it will help you formulate a better

question.

Don't shotgun-blast all the available help channels at once,

that's like yelling and irritates people. Step through them.

Know what your topic is! One of the classic mistakes is asking

questions about the Unix or Windows programming interface in a

forum devoted to a language or library or tool that is

portable across both. If you don't understand why this is a

blunder, you'd be best off not asking any questions at all

until you get it.

In general, questions to a well-selected public forum are more

likely to get useful answers than equivalent questions to a

private one. There are multiple reasons for this. One is

simply the size of the pool of potential respondents. Another

is the size of the audience; hackers would rather answer

questions that educate a lot of people than questions which

only serve a few.

Understandably, skilled hackers and authors of popular

software are already receiving more than their fair share of

mistargeted messages. By adding to the flood, you could in

extreme cases even be the straw which breaks the camel's back

— quite a few times, contributors to popular projects have

withdrawn their support because the collateral damage in the

form of useless email traffic to their personal accounts

became unbearable.

Web and IRC forums directed towards newbies often give the

quickest response
Your local user group, or your Linux distribution, may

advertise a Web forum or IRC channel where newbies can get

help. (In non-English-speaking countries newbie forums are

still more likely to be mailing lists.) These are good first

places, to ask, especially if you think you may have tripped

over a relatively simple or common problem. An advertised IRC

channel is an open invitation to ask questions there and often

get answers in real time.

In fact, if you got the program that is giving you problems

from a distro (as common today), it may be better to ask in

the distro forum/list before trying the program's project

forum/list. The project's hackers may just say, “use our

build”.

Before posting to any Web forum, check if it has a Search

feature. And if it does, try a couple of keyword searches for

something like your problem; it just might help. If you did a

general Web search before (as you should have), search the

forum anyway; your web-wide search engine might not have all

of this forum indexed recently.

There is an increasing tendency for projects to do user

support over a Web forum or IRC channel, with email more

reserved for development traffic. So look for those channels

first when seeking project-specific help.

As a second step, use project mailing lists
When a project has a development mailing list, write to the

mailing list, not to individual developers, even if you

believe that you know who can answer your question best. Check

the documentation of the project and its homepage for the

address of a project mailing list, and use it. There are

several good reasons for this policy:

Any question that's good enough to be asked of one developer

will also be of value to the whole group. Contrariwise, if you

suspect that your question is too dumb for a mailing list,

it's not an excuse to harass individual developers.

Asking questions on the list distributes load between

developers. The individual developer (especially if he's the

project leader) may be too busy to answer your questions.

Most mailing lists are archived and the archives are indexed

by search engines. Somebody could find your question and the

answer on the web instead of asking it again in the list.

If certain questions are seen to be asked often, the

developers can use that information to improve the

documentation or the software itself to be less confusing. But

if those questions are asked in private, nobody has the

complete picture of what questions are asked most often.

If a project has both a “user” and a “developer” (or

“hacker”) mailing list or Web forum, and you are not hacking

on the code, ask in the “user” list/forum. Do not assume

that you will be welcome on the developer list, where they are

likely to experience your question as noise disrupting their

developer traffic.

However, if you are sure your question is non-trivial, and you

get no answer in the “user” list/forum for several days, try

the “developer” one. You would be well advised to lurk there

for a few days before posting to learn the local folkways

(actually this is good advice on any private or semi-private

list).

If you cannot find a project's mailing list address, but only

see the address of the maintainer of the project, go ahead and

write to the maintainer. But even in that case, don't assume

that the mailing list doesn't exist. State in your e-mail that

you tried and could not find the appropriate mailing list.

Also mention that you don't object to having your message

forwarded to other people. (Many people believe that private

e-mail should remain private, even if there is nothing secret

in it. By allowing your message to be forwarded you give your

correspondent a choice about how to handle your e-mail.)

Use meaningful, specific subject headers
On mailing lists, newsgroups or Web forums, the subject header

is your golden opportunity to attract qualified experts'

attention in around 50 characters or fewer. 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.

A 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:
XFree86 4.1 misshapen mouse cursor, Fooware MV1005 vid.

chipset

Smarter:
XFree86 4.1 mouse cursor on Fooware MV1005 vid. chipset - is

misshapen

The process of writing an “object-deviation” description

will help you organize your thinking about the problem in more

detail. What is affected? Just the mouse cursor or other

graphics too? Is this specific to XFree86? To version 4.1? Is

this specific to Fooware video chipsets? To model MV1005? A

hacker 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.

If you ask a question in a reply, be sure to change the

subject line to indicate that you are asking a question. A

Subject line that looks like “Re: test” or “Re: new bug” is

less likely to attract useful amounts of attention. Also, pare

quotes of previous messages to the minimum consistent with

cluing in new readers.

Do not simply hit reply to a list message in order to start an

entirely new thread. This will limit your audience. Some mail

readers, like mutt, allow the user to sort by thread and then

hide messages in a thread by folding the thread. Folks who do

that will never see your message.

Changing the subject is not sufficient. Mutt, and probably

other mail readers, looks at other information in the email's

headers to assign it to a thread, not the subject line.

Instead start an entirely new email.

On Web forums the rules of good practice are slightly

different, because messages are usually much more tightly

bound to specfic discussion threads and often invisible

outside those threads. Changing the subject when asking a

question in reply is not essential (not all forums even allow

separate subject lines on replies, and nearly nobody reads

them when they do). But asking a question in a reply is a

dubious practice in itself, because it will only be seen by

those who are watching this thread. So, unless you are sure

you want to ask the people currently active in the thread,

start a new one.

Make it easy to reply
Finishing your query with “Please send your reply to... ”

makes it quite unlikely you will get an answer. If you can't

be bothered to take even the few seconds required to set up a

correct Reply-To header in your mail agent, we can't be

bothered to take even a few seconds to think about your

problem. If your mail program doesn't permit this, get a

better mail program. If your operating system doesn't support

any mail programs that permit this, get a better operating

system.

In Web forums, asking for a reply by email is outright rude,

unless you believe the information may be sensitive (and

somebody will, for some unknown reason, let you but not the

whole forum know it). If you want to get an email when

somebody replies in the thread, request that the Web forum

send it; this feature is supported almost everywhere under

options like “watch this thread”, “send email on answers”,

etc.)

Write in clear, grammatical, correctly-spelled language
We've found by experience that people who are careless and

sloppy writers are usually also careless and sloppy at

thinking and coding (often enough to bet on, anyway).

Answering questions for careless and sloppy thinkers is not

rewarding; we'd rather spend our time elsewhere.

So expressing your question clearly and well is important. If

you can't be bothered to do that, we can't be bothered to pay

attention. Spend the extra effort to polish your language. It

doesn't have to be stiff or formal — in fact, hacker culture

values informal, slangy and humorous language used with

precision. But it has to be precise; there has to be some

indication that you're thinking and paying attention.

Spell, punctuate, and capitalize correctly. Don't confuse

“its” with “it's”, “loose” with “lose”, or “discrete”

with “discreet”. Don't TYPE IN ALL CAPS, this is read as

shouting and considered rude. (All-smalls is only slightly

less annoying, as it's difficult to read. Alan Cox can get

away with it, but you can't.)

More generally, if you write like a semi-literate boob you

will very likely be ignored. Writing like a l33t script kiddie

hax0r is the absolute kiss of death and guarantees you will

receive nothing but stony silence (or, at best, a heaping

helping of scorn and sarcasm) in return.

If you are asking questions in a forum that does not use your

native language, you will get a limited amount of slack for

spelling and grammar errors — but no extra slack at all for

laziness (and yes, we can usually spot that difference). Also,

unless you know what your respondent's languages are, write in

English. Busy hackers tend to simply flush questions in

languages they don't understand, and English is the working

language of the Internet. By writing in English you minimize

your chances that your question will be discarded unread.

Send questions in formats that are easy to understand
If you make your question artificially hard to read, it is

more likely to be passed over in favor of one that isn't. So:

Send plain text mail, not HTML. (It's not hard to turn off

HTML.)

MIME attachments are usually OK, but only if they are real

content (such as an attached source file or patch), and not

merely boilerplate generated by your mail client (such as

another copy of your message).

Don't send mail in which entire paragraphs are single

multiply-wrapped lines. (This makes it too difficult to reply

to just part of the message.) Assume that your respondents

will be reading mail on 80-character-wide text displays and

set your line wrap accordingly, to something less than 80.

However, do not wrap data (such as log file dumps or session

transcripts) at any fixed column width. Data should be

included as-is, so respondents can have confidence that they

are seeing what you saw.

Don't send MIME Quoted-Printable encoding to an English-

language forum. This encoding can be necessary when you're

posting in a language ASCII doesn't cover, but a lot of mail

agents don't support it. When they break, all those =20 glyphs

scattered through the text are ugly and distracting.

Never, ever expect hackers to be able to read closed

proprietary document formats like Microsoft Word or Excel.

Most hackers react to these about as well as you would to

having a pile of steaming pig manure dumped on your doorstep.

Even when they can cope, they resent having to do so.

If you're sending mail from a Windows machine, turn off

Microsoft's stupid “Smart Quotes” feature. This is so you'll

avoid sprinkling garbage characters through your mail.

In Web forums, do not abuse “smiley” and “html” features

(when they are present). A smiley or two is usually OK, but

colored fancy text tends to make people think you are lame.

Seriously overusing smileys and color and fonts will make you

come off like a giggly teenage girl, which is not generally a

good idea unless you are more interested in sex than answers.

If you're using a graphical-user-interface mail client, (such

as Netscape Messenger, MS Outlook, or their ilk) beware that

it may violate these rules when used with its default

settings. Most such clients have a menu-based “View Source”

command. Use this on something in your sent-mail folder to

check that you are sending plain text without unnecessary

attached crud.

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). Provide your vendor's distribution and

release level (e.g.: “Fedora Core 2”, “Slackware 9.1”,

etc.).

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 recent changes in your computer or software

configuration that might be relevant.

Do the best you can to anticipate the questions a hacker will

ask, and to answer them in advance in your request for help.

Simon Tatham has written an excellent essay entitled How to

Report Bugs Effectively. I strongly recommend that you read

it.

Volume is not precision
You need to be precise and informative. This end is not served

by simply dumping huge volumes of code or data into a help

request. If you have a large, complicated test case that is

breaking a program, try to trim it and make it as small as

possible.

This is useful for at least three reasons. One: being seen to

invest effort in simplifying the question makes it more likely

that you'll get an answer, Two: simplifying the question makes

it more likely you'll get a useful answer. Three: In the

process of refining your bug report, you may develop a fix or

workaround yourself.

Don't claim that you have found a bug
When you are having problems with a piece of software, don't

claim you have found a bug unless you are very, very sure of

your ground. Hint: unless you can provide a source-code patch

that fixes the problem, or a regression test against a

previous version that demonstrates incorrect behavior, you are

probably not sure enough. This applies to web pages and

documentation, too; if you have found a documentation “bug”,

you should supply replacement text and which pages it should

go on.

Remember, there are a lot of other users that are not

experiencing your problem. Otherwise you would have learned

about it while reading the documentation and searching the Web

(you did do that before complaining, didn't you?). This means

that very probably it is you who are doing something wrong,

not the software.

The people who wrote the software work very hard to make it

work as well as possible. If you claim you have found a bug,

you'll be implying that they did something wrong, and you will

almost always offend them — even when you are correct. It's

especially undiplomatic to yell “bug” in the Subject line.

When asking your question, it is best to write as though you

assume you are doing something wrong, even if you are

privately pretty sure you have found an actual bug. If there

really is a bug, you will hear about it in the answer. Play it

so the maintainers will want to apologize to you if the bug is

real, rather than so that you will owe them an apology if you

have messed up.

Grovelling is not a substitute for doing your homework
Some people who get that they shouldn't behave rudely or

arrogantly, demanding an answer, retreat to the opposite

extreme of grovelling. “I know I'm just a pathetic newbie

loser, but...”. This is distracting and unhelpful. It's

especially annoying when it's coupled with vagueness about the

actual problem.

Don't waste your time, or ours, on crude primate politics.

Instead, present the background facts and your question as

clearly as you can. That is a better way to position yourself

than by grovelling.

Sometimes Web forums have separate places for newbie

questions. If you feel you do have a newbie question, just go

there. But don't grovel there either.

Describe the problem's symptoms, not your guesses
It's not useful to tell hackers 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.

Stupid:
I'm getting back-to-back SIG11 errors on kernel compiles, and

suspect a hairline crack on one of the motherboard traces.

What's the best way to check for those?

Smart:
My home-built K6/233 on an FIC-PA2007 motherboard (VIA Apollo

VP2 chipset) with 256MB Corsair PC133 SDRAM starts getting

frequent SIG11 errors about 20 minutes after power-on during

the course of kernel compiles, but never in the first 20

minutes. Rebooting doesn't restart the clock, but powering

down overnight does. Swapping out all RAM didn't help. The

relevant part of a typical compile session log follows.

Describe your problem's symptoms in chronological order
The most useful clues 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. In the case of command

-line processes, having a session log (e.g., using the script

utility) and quoting the relevant twenty or so lines is very

useful.

If the program that blew up on you has diagnostic options

(such as -v for verbose), try to think carefully about

selecting options that will add useful debugging information

to the transcript.

If your account ends up being long (more than about four

paragraphs), it might be useful to succinctly state the

problem up top, then follow with the chronological tale. That

way, hackers will know what to watch for in reading your

account.

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 a lot of

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.

Don't ask people to reply by private email
Hackers believe 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, they 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.

There is one limited exception to this rule. If you think the

question is such that you are likely to get a lot of answers

that are all pretty similar, then the magic words are “email

me and I'll summarize the answers for the group”. It is

courteous to try and save the mailing list or newsgroup a

flood of substantially identical postings — but you have to

keep the promise to summarize.

Be explicit about the question you have
Open-ended questions tend to be perceived as open-ended time

sinks. The people most likely to be able to give you a useful

answer are also the busiest people (if only because they take

on the most work themselves). People like that are allergic to

open-ended time sinks, thus they tend to be allergic to open-

ended questions.

You are more likely to get a useful response if you are

explicit about what you want respondents to do (provide

pointers, send code, check your patch, whatever). This will

focus their effort and implicitly put an upper bound on the

time and energy a respondent has to put in to helping you.

This is good.

To understand the world the experts live in, think of

expertise as an abundant resource and time to respond as a

scarce one. The less of a time commitment you implicitly ask

for, the more likely you are to get an answer from someone

really good and really busy.

So it is useful to frame your question to minimize the time

commitment required for an expert to field it — but this is

often not the same thing as simplifying the question. Thus,

for example, “Would you give me a pointer to a good

explanation of X?” is usually a smarter question than “Would

you explain X, please?”. If you have some code that isn't

working, it is usually smarter to ask for someone to explain

what's wrong with it than it is to ask someone to fix it.

Don't post homework questions
Hackers are good at spotting homework questions; most of us

have done them ourselves. Those questions are for you to work

out, so that you will learn from the experience. It is OK to

ask for hints, but not for entire solutions.

If you suspect you have been passed a homework question, but

can't solve it anyway, try asking in a user group forum or (as

a last resort) in a “user” list/forum of a project. While

the hackers will spot it, some of the advanced users may at

least give you a hint.

Prune pointless queries
Resist the temptation to close your request for help with

semantically-null questions like “Can anyone help me?” or “

Is there an answer?” First: if you've written your problem

description halfway competently, such tacked-on questions are

at best superfluous. Second: because they are superfluous,

hackers find them annoying — and are likely to return

logically impeccable but dismissive answers like “Yes, you

can be helped” and “No, there is no help for you.”

In general, asking yes-or-no questions is a good thing to

avoid unless you want a yes-or-no answer.

Don't flag your question as “Urgent”, even if it is for you
That's your problem, not ours. Claiming urgency is very likely

to be counter-productive: most hackers will simply delete such

messages as rude and selfish attempts to elicit immediate and

special attention.

There is one semi-exception. It can be worth mentioning if

you're using the program in some high-profile place, one that

the hackers will get excited about; in such a case, if you're

under time pressure, and you say so politely, people may get

interested enough to answer faster.

This is a very risky thing to do, however, because the

hackers' metric for what is exciting probably differ from

yours. Posting from the International Space Station would

qualify, for example, but posting on behalf of a feel-good

charitable or political cause would almost certainly not. In

fact, posting “Urgent: Help me save the fuzzy baby seals!”

will reliably get you shunned or flamed even by hackers who

think fuzzy baby seals are important.

If you find this mysterious, re-read the rest of this how-to

repeatedly until you understand it before posting anything at

all.

Courtesy never hurts, and sometimes helps
Be courteous. Use “Please” and “Thanks for your attention”

or “Thanks for your consideration”. Make it clear that you

appreciate the time people spend helping you for free.

To be honest, this isn't as important as (and cannot

substitute for) being grammatical, clear, precise and

descriptive, avoiding proprietary formats etc.; hackers in

general would rather get somewhat brusque but technically

sharp bug reports than polite vagueness. (If this puzzles you,

remember that we value a question by what it teaches us.)

However, if you've got your technical ducks in a row,

politeness does increase your chances of getting a useful

answer.

(We must note that the only serious objection we have received

from veteran hackers to this HOWTO is with respect to our

previous recommendation to use “Thanks in advance”. Some

hackers feel this connotes an intention not to thank anybody

afterwards. Our recommendation is to either say “Thanks in

advance” first and thank respondents afterwards, or express

courtesy in a different way, such as by saying “Thanks for

your attention” or “Thanks for your consideration”.)

Follow up with a brief note on the solution
Send a note after the problem has been solved to all who

helped you; let them know how it came out and thank them again

for their help. If the problem attracted general interest in a

mailing list or newsgroup, it's appropriate to post the

followup there.

Optimally, the reply should be to the thread started by the

original question posting, and should have ‘FIXED’,

‘RESOLVED’ or an equally obvious tag in the subject line. On

mailing lists with fast turnaround, a potential respondent who

sees a thread about “Problem X” ending with “Problem X -

FIXED” knows not to waste his/her time even reading the

thread (unless (s)he) personally finds Problem X interesting)

and can therefore use that time solving a different problem.

Your followup doesn't have to be long and involved; a simple

“Howdy — it was a failed network cable! Thanks, everyone. -

Bill” would be better than nothing. In fact, a short and

sweet summary is better than a long dissertation unless the

solution has real technical depth. Say what action solved the

problem, but you need not replay the whole troubleshooting

sequence.

For problems with some depth, it is appropriate to post a

summary of the troubleshooting history. Describe your final

problem statement. Describe what worked as a solution, and

indicate avoidable blind alleys after that. The blind alleys

should come after the correct solution and other summary

material, rather than turning the follow-up into a detective

story. Name the names of people who helped you; you'll make

friends that way.

Besides being courteous and informative, this sort of followup

will help others searching the archive of the mailing-

list/newsgroup/forum to know exactly which solution helped you

and thus may also help them.

Last, and not least, this sort of followup helps everybody who

assisted feel a satisfying sense of closure about the problem.

If you are not a techie or hacker yourself, trust us that this

feeling is very important to the gurus and experts you tapped

for help. Problem narratives that trail off into unresolved

nothingness are frustrating things; hackers itch to see them

resolved. The good karma that scratching that itch earns you

will be very, very helpful to you next time you need to pose a

question.

Consider how you might be able to prevent others from having

the same problem in the future. Ask yourself if a

documentation or FAQ patch would help, and if the answer is

yes send that patch to the maintainer.

Among hackers, this sort of behavior is actually more

important than conventional politeness. It's how you get a

reputation for playing well with others, which can be a very

valuable asset.

How To Interpret Answers
RTFM and STFW: How To Tell You've Seriously Screwed Up
There is an ancient and hallowed tradition: if you get a reply

that reads “RTFM”, the person who sent it thinks you should

have Read The Fucking Manual. He is almost certainly right. Go

read it.

RTFM has a younger relative. If you get a reply that reads

“STFW”, the person who sent it thinks you should have

Searched The Fucking Web. He is almost certainly right. Go

search it. (The milder version of this is when you are told “

Google is your friend!”)

In Web forums, you may also be told to search the forum

archives. In fact, someone may even be so kind as to provide a

pointer to the previous thread where this problem was solved.

But do not rely on this consideration; do your archive-

searching before asking.

Often, the person telling you to do a search has the manual or

the web page with the information you need open, and is

looking at it as he types. These replies mean that he thinks

(a) the information you need is easy to find, and (b) you will

learn more if you seek out the information than if you have it

spoon-fed to you.

You shouldn't be offended by this; by hacker standards, he is

showing you a rough kind of respect simply by not ignoring

you. You should instead thank him for his grandmotherly

kindness.

If you don't understand...
If you don't understand the answer, do not immediately bounce

back a demand for clarification. Use the same tools that you

used to try and answer your original question (manuals, FAQs,

the Web, skilled friends) to understand the answer. Then, if

you still need to ask for clarification, exhibit what you have

learned.

For example, suppose I tell you: “It sounds like you've got a

stuck zentry; you'll need to clear it.” Then here's a bad

followup question: “What's a zentry?” And here's a good

followup question: “OK, I read the man page and zentries are

only mentioned under the -z and -p switches. Neither of them

says anything about clearing zentries. Is it one of these or

am I missing something here?”

Dealing with rudeness
Much of what looks like rudeness in hacker circles is not

intended to give offence. Rather, it's the product of the

direct, cut-through-the-bullshit communications style that is

natural to people who are more concerned about solving

problems than making others feel warm and fuzzy.

When you perceive rudeness, try to react calmly. If someone is

really acting out, it is very likely that a senior person on

the list or newsgroup or forum will call him or her on it. If

that doesn't happen and you lose your temper, it is likely

that the person you lose it at was behaving within the hacker

community's norms and you will be considered at fault. This

will hurt your chances of getting the information or help you

want.

On the other hand, you will occasionally run across rudeness

and posturing that is quite gratuitous. The flip-side of the

above is that it is acceptable form to slam real offenders

quite hard, dissecting their misbehavior with a sharp verbal

scalpel. Be very, very sure of your ground before you try

this, however. The line between correcting an incivility and

starting a pointless flamewar is thin enough that hackers

themselves not infrequently blunder across it; if you are a

newbie or an outsider, your chances of avoiding such a blunder

are low. If you're after information rather than

entertainment, it's better to keep your fingers off the

keyboard than to risk this.

(Some people assert that many hackers have a mild form of

autism or Asperger's Syndrome, and are actually missing some

of the brain circuitry that lubricates `normal' human social

interaction. This may or may not be true. If you are not a

hacker yourself, it may help you cope with our eccentricities

if you think of us as being brain-damaged. Go right ahead. We

won't care; we like being whatever it is we are, and generally

have a healthy skepticism about clinical labels.)

In the next section, we'll talk about a different issue; the

kind of `rudeness' you'll see when you misbehave.

On Not Reacting Like A Loser
Odds are you'll screw up a few times on hacker community

forums — in ways detailed in this article, or similar. And

you'll be told exactly how you screwed up, possibly with

colourful asides. In public.

When this happens, the worst thing you can do is whine about

the experience, claim to have been verbally assaulted, demand

apologies, scream, hold your breath, threaten lawsuits,

complain to people's employers, leave the toilet seat up, etc.

Instead, here's what you do:

Get over it. It's normal. In fact, it's healthy and

appropriate.

Community standards do not maintain themselves: They're

maintained by people actively applying them, visibly, in

public. Don't whine that all criticism should have been

conveyed via private mail: That's not how it works. Nor is it

useful to insist you've been personally insulted when someone

comments that one of your claims was wrong, or that his views

differ. Those are loser attitudes.

There have been hacker forums where, out of some misguided

sense of hyper-courtesy, participants are banned from posting

any fault-finding with another's posts, and told “Don't say

anything if you're unwilling to help the user.” The resulting

departure of clueful participants to elsewhere causes them to

descend into meaningless babble and become useless as

technical forums.

Exaggeratedly “friendly” (in that fashion) or useful: Pick

one.

Remember: When that hacker tells you that you've screwed up,

and (no matter how gruffly) tells you not to do it again, he's

acting out of concern for (1) you and (2) his community. It

would be much easier for him to ignore you and filter you out

of his life. If you can't manage to be grateful, at least have

a little dignity, don't whine, and don't expect to be treated

like a fragile doll just because you're a newcomer with a

theatrically hypersensitive soul and delusions of entitlement.

Sometimes people will attack you personally, flame without an

apparent reason, etc., even if you don't screw up (or have

only screwed up in their imagination). In this case,

complaining is the way to really screw up.

These flamers are either lamers who don't have a clue but

believe themselves to be experts, or would-be psychologists

testing whether you'll screw up. The other readers either

ignore them, or find ways to deal with them on their own. The

flamers' behavior creates problems for themselves, which don't

have to concern you.

Don't let yourself be drawn into a flamewar, either. Most

flames are best ignored — after you've checked whether they

are really flames, not pointers to the ways in which you have

screwed up, and not cleverly ciphered answers to your real

question (this happens as well).

Questions Not To Ask
Here are some classic stupid questions, and what hackers are

thinking when they don't answer them.

Q: Where can I find program or resource X?
Q: How can I use X to do Y?
Q: How can I configure my shell prompt?
Q: Can I convert an AcmeCorp document into a TeX file using

the Bass-o-matic file converter?
Q: My {program, configuration, SQL statement} doesn't work
Q: I'm having problems with my Windows machine. Can you help?
Q: My program doesn't work. I think system facility X is

broken.
Q: I'm having problems installing Linux or X. Can you help?
Q: How can I crack root/steal channel-ops privileges/read

someone's email?
Q: Where can I find program or resource X?
 
A: The same place I'd find it, fool — at the other end of a

web search. Ghod, doesn't everybody know how to use Google

yet?
 
Q: How can I use X to do Y?
 
A: If what you want is to do Y, you should ask that question

without pre-supposing the use of a method that may not be

appropriate. Questions of this form often indicate a person

who is not merely ignorant about X, but confused about what

problem Y they are solving and too fixated on the details of

their particular situation. It is generally best to ignore

such people until they define their problem better.
 
Q: How can I configure my shell prompt?
 
A: If you're smart enough to ask this question, you're smart

enough to RTFM and find out yourself.
 
Q: Can I convert an AcmeCorp document into a TeX file using

the Bass-o-matic file converter?
 
A: Try it and see. If you did that, you'd (a) learn the

answer, and (b) stop wasting my time.
 
Q: My {program, configuration, SQL statement} doesn't work
 
A: This is not a question, and I'm not interested in playing

Twenty Questions to pry your actual question out of you — I

have better things to do. On seeing something like this, my

reaction is normally of one of the following:

do you have anything else to add to that?

oh, that's too bad, I hope you get it fixed.

and this has exactly what to do with me?
 
Q: I'm having problems with my Windows machine. Can you help?
 
A: Yes. Throw out that Microsoft trash and install an open-

source operating system like Linux or BSD.

Note: you can ask questions related to Windows machines if

they are about a program that does have an official Windows

build, or interacts with Windows machines (i.e. Samba). Just

don't be surprised by the reply that the problem is with

Windows and not the program, because Windows is so broken in

general that this is very often the case.
 
Q: My program doesn't work. I think system facility X is

broken.
 
A: While it is possible that you are the first person to

notice an obvious deficiency in system calls and libraries

heavily used by hundreds or thousands of people, it is rather

more likely that you are utterly clueless. Extraordinary

claims require extraordinary evidence; when you make a claim

like this one, you must back it up with clear and exhaustive

documentation of the failure case.
 
Q: I'm having problems installing Linux or X. Can you help?
 
A: No. I'd need hands-on access to your machine to

troubleshoot this. Go ask your local Linux user group for

hands-on help. (You can find a list of user groups here.)

Note: questions about installing Linux may be appropriate if

you're on a forum or mailing list about a particular distro,

and the problem is with that distro; or on local user groups

forums. In this case, be sure to describe the exact details of

the failure. But do careful searching first, with "linux" and

all suspicious pieces of hardware.
 
Q: How can I crack root/steal channel-ops privileges/read

someone's email?
 
A: You're a lowlife for wanting to do such things and a moron

for asking a hacker to help you.
 

Good and Bad Questions
Finally, I'm going to illustrate how to ask questions in a

smart way by example; pairs of questions about the same

problem, one asked in a stupid way and one in a smart way.

Stupid: Where can I find out stuff about the Foonly

Flurbamatic?
This question just begs for "STFW" as a reply.

Smart: I used Google to try to find “Foonly Flurbamatic 2600

” on the Web, but I got no useful hits. Does anyone know

where I can find programming information on this device?
This one has already STFWed, and sounds like he might have a

real problem.

Stupid: I can't get the code from project foo to compile. Why

is it broken?
He assumes that somebody else screwed up. Arrogant of him.

Smart: The code from project foo doesn't compile under Nulix

version 6.2. I've read the FAQ, but it doesn't have anything

in it about Nulix-related problems. Here's a transcript of my

compilation attempt; is it something I did?
He's specified the environment, he's read the FAQ, he's

showing the error, and he's not assuming his problems are

someone else's fault. This guy might be worth some attention.

Stupid: I'm having problems with my motherboard. Can anybody

help?
J. Random Hacker's response to this is likely to be “Right.

Do you need burping and diapering, too?” followed by a punch

of the delete key.

Smart: I tried X, Y, and Z on the S2464 motherboard. When that

didn't work, I tried A, B, and C. Note the curious symptom

when I tried C. Obviously the florbish is grommicking, but the

results aren't what one might expect. What are the usual

causes of grommicking on Athlon MP motherboards? Anybody got

ideas for more tests I can run to pin down the problem?
This person, on the other hand, seems worthy of an answer. He

has exhibited problem-solving intelligence rather than

passively waiting for an answer to drop from on high.

In the last question, notice the subtle but important

difference between demanding “Give me an answer” and

“Please help me figure out what additional diagnostics I can

run to achieve enlightenment.”

In fact, the form of that last question is closely based on a

real incident that happened in August 2001 on the linux-kernel

mailing list (lkml). I (Eric) was the one asking the question

that time. I was seeing mysterious lockups on a Tyan S2462

motherboard. The listmembers supplied the critical information

I needed to solve them.

By asking the question in the way I did, I gave people

something to chew on; I made it easy and attractive for them

to get involved. I demonstrated respect for my peers' ability

and invited them to consult with me as a peer. I also

demonstrated respect for the value of their time by telling

them the blind alleys I had already run down.

Afterwards, when I thanked everyone and remarked how well the

process had worked, an lkml member observed that he thought it

had worked not because I'm a “name” on that list, but

because I asked the question in the proper form.

Hackers are in some ways a very ruthless meritocracy; I'm

certain he was right, and that if I had behaved like a sponge

I would have been flamed or ignored no matter who I was. His

suggestion that I write up the whole incident as instruction

to others led directly to the composition of this guide.

If You Can't Get An Answer
If you can't get an answer, please don't take it personally

that we don't feel we can help you. Sometimes the members of

the asked group may simply not know the answer. No response is

not the same as being ignored, though admittedly it's hard to

spot the difference from outside.

In general, simply re-posting your question is a bad idea.

This will be seen as pointlessly annoying.

There are other sources of help you can go to, often sources

better adapted to a novice's needs.

There are many online and local user groups who are

enthusiasts about the software, even though they may never

have written any software themselves. These groups often form

so that people can help each other and help new users.

There are also plenty of commercial companies you can contract

with for help, both large and small (Red Hat and Linuxcare are

two of the best known; there are many others). Don't be

dismayed at the idea of having to pay for a bit of help! After

all, if your car engine blows a head gasket, chances are you

would take it to a repair shop and pay to get it fixed. Even

if the software didn't cost you anything, you can't expect

that support will always come for free.

For popular software like Linux, there are at least 10,000

users per developer. It's just not possible for one person to

handle the support calls from over 10,000 users. Remember that

even if you have to pay for support, you are still paying much

less than if you had to buy the software as well (and support

for closed-source software is usually more expensive and less

competent than support for open-source software).

How To Answer Questions in a Helpful Way
Be gentle. Problem-related stress can make people seem rude or

stupid even when they're not.

Reply to a first offender off-line. There is no need of public

humiliation for someone who may have made an honest mistake. A

real newbie may not know how to search archives or where the

FAQ is stored or posted.

If you don't know for sure, say so! A wrong but authoritative

-sounding answer is worse than none at all. Don't point anyone

down a wrong path simply because it's fun to sound like an

expert. Be humble and honest; set a good example for both the

querent and your peers.

If you can't help, don't hinder. Don't make jokes about

procedures that could trash the user's setup — the poor sap

might interpret these as instructions.

Ask probing questions to elicit more details. If you're good

at this, the querent will learn something — and so might you.

Try to turn the bad question into a good one; remember we were

all newbies once.

While just muttering RTFM is sometimes justified when replying

to someone who is just a lazy slob, a pointer to documentation

(even if it's just a suggestion to Google for a key phrase) is

better.

If you're going to answer the question at all, give good

value. Don't suggest kludgy workarounds when somebody is using

the wrong tool or approach. Suggest good tools. Reframe the

question.

Help your community learn from the question. When you field a

good question, ask yourself “How would the relevant

documentation or FAQ have to change so that nobody has to

answer this again?” Then send a patch to the document

maintainer.

If you did research to answer the question, demonstrate your

skills rather than writing as though you pulled the answer out

of your butt. Answering one good question is like feeding a

hungry person one meal, but teaching them research skills by

example is teaching them to grow food for a lifetime.

Related Resources
If you need instruction in the basics of how personal

computers, Unix, and the Internet work, see The Unix and

Internet Fundamentals HOWTO.

When you release software or write patches for software, try

to follow the guidelines in the Software Release Practice

HOWTO.

Acknowledgements
Evelyn Mitchell contributed some example stupid questions and

inspired the “How To Give A Good Answer” section. Mikhail

Ramendik contributed some particularly valuable suggestions

for improvements.