+1 to Rigby's post, with one difference: when I am replying to something technical for a beginner I tend to spend a lot of time to verify all sources, info for correctness, etc. What ends up happening is that I usually am overrun by faster contributors. Thus I refrain from using the channel capacity of the forum with comments are so below their entropy they carry no useful information.
Similarly to Phaedrus, part of my work is answering technical questions on certain forums - yes, from customers and from hobbyists, students, etc AD FREAKING NAUSEUM. I have my share of terse or really insulting questions that were replied with "Google is your friend: <insert_meaningful_result>" or "with the level of detail provided it is impossible to...", but the alternative of shooting a snide comment wastes your time and does not help the other party.
@c4757... I am also very intrigued by the mystery of the missing post...
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.
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
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 the X.org version of X? To version 6.8.1? 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.
Don't try to impress us with the depth of your anguish
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. So don't use instant-messaging shortcuts. Spelling "you" as "u" makes you look like a semi-literate boob to save two entire keystrokes. Worse: 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 writing in English but it is a second language for you, it is good form to alert potential respondents to potential language difficulties and options for getting around them.
So back to the whining part. Lets say someone puts in a ticket for help for say the mail box full issue. The problem may only be "Well looks like you've got a 1GB file stuck in your outbox and that's never going to send" but a lot of times they'll insist on telling you that "I've been waiting hours and hours opening and closing Outlook rebooting my computer for hours and hours and I'm so frustrated blah blah" for 10 minutes before they'll even let you touch the computer.
So back to the whining part. Lets say someone puts in a ticket for help for say the mail box full issue. The problem may only be "Well looks like you've got a 1GB file stuck in your outbox and that's never going to send" but a lot of times they'll insist on telling you that "I've been waiting hours and hours opening and closing Outlook rebooting my computer for hours and hours and I'm so frustrated blah blah" for 10 minutes before they'll even let you touch the computer.
I can often be reasonably patient with electronics. But trying to help people with computers is likely to make me rather violent...
@Skimask
Doctor's job is to provide medical advice and is getting payed for that. Is anyone here employed at the EEVblog forum to answer n00b questions? From what I can see, the answer is no, so there's no need to complain about lack of payment.
QuoteDon't try to impress us with the depth of your anguish
I do find it very annoying when people seemed more focused on getting sympathy from you for their level of frustration than getting to the point.
QuoteWrite 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.
Technology very rarely frustrates me. PEOPLE frustrate me. Technology is logical, it does what it is told relentlessly whether you like it or not. People relentlessly do whatever they want regardless of what they're told.
However, regarding grammar, clarity, etc, it is very hard to do in an international forum. I get a lot of questions from around the world and it is not uncommon that I have to use the portuguese way of saying things before I can decode the message (I am brazilian). Not only that, but certain cultures (brazilian included) have a tendency to tell a long background and intertwine the questions with the text, or sometimes only at the end. Other cultures (US american included) diagonally read long texts and usually do not comprehend the problem at hand.
In my experience, over the years I always had to work four times harder to write a question in english and make sure the verbiage was appropriate, the spelling was correct - even still I had communication problems. Polishing the communications in english took me several years and, after I reached a point of reasonable clarity, I used to help my customers and even re-write their questions so they would get an answer.
As the text said, these will fall off the importance list if you have schedules and goals or is simply pressed by time (this usually does not happen here as everybody is a volunteer).
... Eventually I just pulled up Google Translate on the computer and we typed responses back and forth. It ended up being that he needed to get the model of computer before we could tell him what could work in it.
I really think it's more important that the established members remember to remind newbies of this like polite, civil adults, rather than that the newbies are dutifully made aware of it.
If you have a good tutorial, diagram, video and you know it works post the link rather than "google it".
I've found most of the stuff I've read here is people being helpful and when I've asked questions people have been generally helpful. There will be trolls and stuff but over all the EEVBlog community is quite good.
However, you can never judge if someone needs to be spoon-fed from the start.
Other than that, I think a forum is not a place to gather information, but a place to communicate. The whole thing "this is answered before", "search the forum" etc is stupid. Information is lost in informal messages and threads that might span 10 pages or even more. Personally I have never found any useful info in this forum by searching, only by asking or using information I read casually some time before.
However this problem was solved a long time ago in the form of a wiki (editable stickies should work too). Common parts lists, best CAD tools to start with, brands of soldering irons, etc etc.
However, you can never judge if someone needs to be spoon-fed from the start.
Other than that, I think a forum is not a place to gather information, but a place to communicate. The whole thing "this is answered before", "search the forum" etc is stupid.
However this problem was solved a long time ago in the form of a wiki (editable stickies should work too). Common parts lists, best CAD tools to start with, brands of soldering irons, etc etc.
Someone who clearly invested some effort in formulating their question, for example because they indicated solutions they tried and failed, and who clearly document their problem (eg. schematic/pictures) are unlikely to need spoon feeding. That definitely motivates me to invest more time in helping them than someone posting 'How do I hook up a LED?'
This I find sad, and I disagree. I have actually found valuable information by searching this forum, and think that the forum archives are an important resource. For example if you're wondering if Hakko soldering stations sold by DealExtreme are genuine, you may find tear downs and discussions on this forum. If you're wondering about heating element quality between Hakko and some knock-offs, then you may find that someone took the time to compare thermal recovery between heating elements. If you're wondering about a split versus solid ground plane, then you'll find that someone built two boards and posted measurements. Some of these posters have invested a significant amount of time in those posts. It's not really fair to expect these people to repost this information every time someone new comes along.
But if I want to know whether I'm wasting those $300 by buying that particular scope, I consider it my job to dig through that information, not to ask someone else to do it for me. The more experiences I read, the better I know what to expect. It's also often non-trivial to summarize a long thread.
Yes, some things could be better stored on a wiki. I don't think the EEVblog wiki ever got enough momentum and participants to really become useful.
Are you volunteering your time?
You have a point here. However knowing something very well, makes an experienced person have a "distorted" idea of what should have been done.
I have a rigol ds1052e. Hackable to 100mhz.
Yes if you(we) are a sum of individuals. But as a community, isn't too much time wasted in this? Wouldn't be better to just not have to answer any question at all?
Now you are just getting defensive.
... at least until we all sniff each others butts.