# Answering questions properly
My pet hate when it comes to technical forums: people who genuinely or otherwise think they're being helpful by firing of the most obvious possible solution to a problem. The etiquette of technical forums is such that people are inclined to think you're an absolute twat if you stare a gift horse in the mouth, but I'm not so sure whether every horse is worth having.
Case in point, is me trawling the Gentoo forums for various pointers to the problem of a slow/juddery/sluggish/lagging/uneven/choppy/not smooth mouse when working in X (yes, the IT world needs a single canonical term for 'juddery' to simplify searches.) There are a host of reasons why my machine could be so slow and I'm trying my best to find and work through them. Almost every single posting on this topic, though, has at least one version of the most helpful "make sure DMA is enabled." This is the most obvious thing to check on a slow system, but by 2004 it must also be the statistically least likely problem with modern hardware and distributions.
As I said, netiquette says you should be grateful for someone taking the time to throw back this answer, but that's exactly the problem: the person replying is *not* really taking time. They're firing off a half-hearted response that took zero effort to think think up, write and post. This is not really helping anyone (except in a few cases) - this is just someone on the wrong end of a sense of self-importance who likes to see their name on-screen.
What you end up with is a person asking a question and a back and forth of emails or posts on a discussion board that are an absolute waste of time:
Not that your average question-asker is off the hook either. One should know how to ask questions the smart way. By stating what trouble-shooting steps you've already taken, you allow would-be helpers to get on your wavelength as quickly as possible. Plenty people don't bother doing this.
Poorly stated questions tend to get jumped on fairly quickly though, so there's enough pressure out there pushing question-askers in the right direction. The problem is that this interminable politeness because somebody is supposedly "taking the time" to help others, means that there's next to no pressure on question-answerers to get their act together.
Case in point, is me trawling the Gentoo forums for various pointers to the problem of a slow/juddery/sluggish/lagging/uneven/choppy/not smooth mouse when working in X (yes, the IT world needs a single canonical term for 'juddery' to simplify searches.) There are a host of reasons why my machine could be so slow and I'm trying my best to find and work through them. Almost every single posting on this topic, though, has at least one version of the most helpful "make sure DMA is enabled." This is the most obvious thing to check on a slow system, but by 2004 it must also be the statistically least likely problem with modern hardware and distributions.
As I said, netiquette says you should be grateful for someone taking the time to throw back this answer, but that's exactly the problem: the person replying is *not* really taking time. They're firing off a half-hearted response that took zero effort to think think up, write and post. This is not really helping anyone (except in a few cases) - this is just someone on the wrong end of a sense of self-importance who likes to see their name on-screen.
What you end up with is a person asking a question and a back and forth of emails or posts on a discussion board that are an absolute waste of time:
"my mouse is choppy"Aaaargh! This is not how I define "help", I'm sorry. By the time every member of the peanut gallery has thrown their "try x" thoughtlet into the pot, the knowledge/sludge ratio of the thread is dreadful. A rare gem is the person who takes the time to reply with a list of steps, or perhaps a more in-depth exploration of possible causes and solutions. Now that is a person deserving of gratitude and kudos. But under no circumstances is "have you enabled DMA" a worthwhile use of frigging bandwidth and time.
"have you enabled DMA"
"yes, I have"
"try x"
"already done that, thanks"
"have you done y?"
"tried that, no luck."
"what about z?"
"did that already"
"sorry, then I'm stumped too"
Not that your average question-asker is off the hook either. One should know how to ask questions the smart way. By stating what trouble-shooting steps you've already taken, you allow would-be helpers to get on your wavelength as quickly as possible. Plenty people don't bother doing this.
Poorly stated questions tend to get jumped on fairly quickly though, so there's enough pressure out there pushing question-askers in the right direction. The problem is that this interminable politeness because somebody is supposedly "taking the time" to help others, means that there's next to no pressure on question-answerers to get their act together.
File under: techie : {2004.08.27 11:50}
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