How To Ask Questions The Smart Way
Browsing around, I found this wonderful article: How To Ask Questions The Smart Way
Here’s the table of contents, which in itself is a wonderful list of things to know when asking a question:
- Before You Ask
- When You Ask
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- 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 accessible, standard formats
- 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 e-mail
- Be explicit about your question
- 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
- 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
- I would really like to take this and shorten it up for a helpdesk application. Imagine prompts as the user is putting in their question, or some simple, yet effective way to get better questions from your users.
