Don't Ask Us Questions. We'll Just Ignore You

blog
21

Sure, it would be lovely to always be nice to the newbies. But as a mere mortal, I have only a limited amount of patience, much of which was drained by a year working front-line telephone support out in the Real World. Now, when faced with a newsgroup post not at all far removed from

(ok, exaggeration: how about

it really takes a huge mental effort to reply with nothing more sarcastic than the answer, along with something like ‘From Google:’ or ‘From the docs:’.

Does this make me a bad person? I hope not. I certainly don’t think it makes me cool.

ps I have pointed people at ESR’s rant before, I think; more recently I have pointed more people at Jon Skeet’s page on “a short but complete program that demonstrates the problem”[1]. It’s a kind of more polite version of the same rant, for programmer forums rather than user forums.

[1] http://www.yoda.arachsys.com/csharp/complete.html

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The link is a good thing to give to a nagging newbie e.g. on IRC.

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short but complete program

This is great!

I am polite to the clueless on the forums, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have my frustrations. I just express them in another forums, as it were:

http://mikepope.com/blog/DisplayBlog.aspx?permalink=554

24

“What we are, unapologetically, is hostile to people who seem to be unwilling to think or to do their own homework before asking questions.”

With one site I have in mind that uses this FAQ, they are just hostile. To everyone. Regardless.

Part of the “balance of evil”, I guess. Excellent free software, run by people who want to abuse you as part of the condition of using it.

Part of the flaw is that ‘homework’ often means 'working really hard to make up for poorly written or inadequate documentation by searching everywhere, hours/days of trial and error, and, as a last resort downloading the source code and looking at that for clues.

“On Not Reacting Like A Loser” is in particular a highly offensive excuse to behave with utmost rudeness while pretending its normal and healthy (ie: this part of the document is simply put, a lie).

With the particular forum I have in mind, I find it impossible to read it without feeling like I am going to have a stroke (literally).

The developers deliberately obfuscate answers, deliberately give wrong answers (pretending the question is unclear when the meaning is plainly obvious to everyone) and waste enormous amounts of time for days playing ping-pong QA when they could just answer the damned question (or fix the documentation or the bug) and save everyone the hassle (including themselves).

Obviously, their time is not that precious if they do this. Do they find it fun? If so, they are not people I want to associate with. “Loser” is a term invented by people who don’t amount to much themselves.

“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.”

No, it is rudeness. The rest of us can communicate in a no-bullshit manner without offending anyone - quite the opposite in fact (clients appreciate it when we do so).

I guess these guys have never been in a real development team or, say, an academic environment where people really work together to solve issues and talk plain technical talk without all these nasty, spiteful, and immature mind games.

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I can certainly see how you would come to your conclusions, if you take the document out of context.

The original essay (yes, it’s mutated over the years) was about asking questions in a technical forum intended primarily for communications between developers on a project. So, yes, truly “clueless” questions are out of place there, and people who ask questions should expect to have done their homework first. However, other communities have different expectations and standards.

For example, I’m the co-owner of the WinDev mailing list [1]. WinDev’s purpose is helping Windows programmers, not intra-project communication, so the atmosphere and environment are quite different. It would be unfair of me to treat “clueless” questions the same way or even to refer people to Eric’s document, so with his permission, I adapted it to our community [2].

But most of the time, folks who cite the essay with the intent of saying “this is what’s wrong with Linux/Open Source/ESR!” find it more convenient to ignore the essay’s context.

[1] a href="http://lists.windev.org"http://lists.windev.org/a
[2] a href="http://www.windev.org/howtoask.html"http://www.windev.org/howtoask.html/a

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My favorite moment in that Open Source movie was when that freak Eric Raymond met the Microsoft Exec in the elevator and told him “I’m your worst nightmare…”. I know he scared the h#ll out of him when he looked at him because of that one eye that’s pointing sideways and the other eye pointing up. That mofo could spook a horse!

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I don’t think that this document is that useful for the average user, however I think it is extremely useful for a lot of people. When I first started using Open-Source software, some friends pointed me to this document, and I’m very grateful that they did.

The point of this document is to allow newbies who are interested in entering the Open-Source community to gain the knowledge and experience that will help them to contribute meaningfully to that community, and to help them get easier answers to questions without causing problems for others in the community.

Yes, it is possible to pick up all of the information in that document just through experience, but it will take significantly longer, and you will make many more mistakes early on. From here, you can learn about basic etiquette in the community, without having to learn it all the hard way.

~TuxGirl

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It is not the person in a forum who asks the question that is answered in the FAQ, but the 1100th person in the forum who asks the exact same question! It often happens that a luser who is attempting to get the answer to a question who, in turn, enters a forum for the free exchange of ideas, NEGLECTS to read any part of the forum except for THEIR OWN question.

Their self-centeredness is grating. On many forums, when such questions are asked, old-timers may respond with profanities, regulars may respond with “RTFM”, and newbies may respond with “Please read the FAQ.”

For instance, on the Alexadex forum there is the following comment:

============== begin comment ===============
862 ppl asking “what, no updates?”, of which half will post the question twice, cos ~15 years after the web made it’s debut, people STILL haven’t figured out what it means to press a button only once. These same people repeatedly bash the elevator buttons, surely that makes the elevators go faster / arrive quicker.

76 ppl asking questions answered in the FAQ; of the questions asked, half will be a variation of “when does this thing update?”, followed by a chorus of “Before posting, have you checked the FAQ?” replies.

=============== end of quote ==================

These kind of things are frustrating to the technically-minded, to those that enjoy going through all the menus of an application, just to see what each will do.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
This forum would not accept my comment due to “questionable content.” Therefore, I’m going to let you know my URL here: technoyid.blog spot.com

Just remove the spaces.

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I greatly esteem that gun-toting, libertarian, obnoxious, snob and zealot called Eric S. Raymond, and invite this audience to read some more of his fine publications, for instance:

"Why Libertarians Should Not Love Bill Gates"
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/libgates.html

"On Socially Responsible Programming"
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cpsr-speech.html

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Oh, he’s posted way nuttier stuff than that…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond#Commentator

Eric S. Raymond isn’t afraid to let his freak flag fly.

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since he wrote his sex tips for geeks.

Oh, it’s on.

Not Safe For My Emotional Well Being

NSFMEWB. Like the first time I was tricked into clicking on the goatse.cx site. Man. That’s one internet merit badge that you don’t want.

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“Eric S. Raymond isn’t afraid to let his freak flag fly.”

I’ve ruled all links to catb.org/* as NSFW since he wrote his sex tips for geeks. Not that I ever read them outside of work to see what they contained, but DAMN, the mere thought of Eric Raymond engaged in sex… MAKE IT STOP… MAKE IT STOP.

I guess catb.org is Not Safe For My Emotional Well Being more than it is Not Safe For Work.

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excuse to behave with utmost rudeness while pretending its normal and healthy

That’s exactly my issue here.

folks who cite the essay with the intent of saying “this is what’s wrong with Linux/Open Source/ESR!” find it more convenient to ignore the essay’s context

I am sympathetic to highly focused email lists, and development email lists, which may need this kind of strict control. But that’s a teeny-tiny subset of the world. I don’t think ESR is scoping his advice to these contexts; he’s projecting it out to the world.

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Paul: I have no idea what forum you are visiting, but it sounds like either you spend your time trolling there or they are the most dysfunctional people ever. Either way, I’m not seeing how there can be any benefits between you and that group: there is a point when you simply walk away from conflict.

On the other hand, there are people who believe they have a god given right to not read documents (the comment about “what is the order of InStr() parameters” has actually happend more times than I can count).

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Doh, lost half my comment to cutting and pasting from Windows to XWindows… continuing:

Yet the response “check your help file for ‘InStr()’” triggers childish behaviour such as cr*pflooding the channel because you didn’t go look it up for them (because, to be honest I forget half the time myself).

If the project you mentioned has such bad docs, and yet you have time to badger those if a forum about them, perhaps a better use of that time would be creating better docs? That is the weakest link in many open source projects.

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Jeff:
But that’s a teeny-tiny subset of the world.
I don’t think ESR is scoping his advice to
these contexts; he’s projecting it out to
the world.

I can agree with that. If I recall correctly, the document was written for the Linux kernel mailing list (you can see some vestiges of that in the example questions). It looks like it’s another case of assuming “all the world’s a XX”, where XX is what you (ESR in this case) are used to.

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It looks like some of the assumptions in this (very interresting) discussion is that:

  • the people who know The Answer can communicate (can like in “have the intellectual ability”)
  • the people who look for stuff are usually telepaths.

I have 15+ years of hard-core unix admin experience and I asked my fair share of dumb questions (one of them even made it to alt.most.funny.of.internet which I am proud of) but I still (as we spek) face the following problem:
I need to install some firmware and I do not know how to do it exactly. I know that this is possible. i go to the forum (best and unique) where these questions are being discussed. I ask politely how to do it explaiing what I tried, what HW I have etc.
What I get is

“yo, (the umpa-umpa music is runnig in the background) you NeEd 2 cee (umpa-umpa) the kjsdhkjsdh SW BIG FONT small font BLINK BLINK umpa umpa BIG small RED YELLOW GR…and man justah flashaaaah it the way yo yo 45fde@ee did it yo”

A search for “kjsdhkjsdh” in the forum does not show anything. I search for ABC (which is what i need) but, see, the search box allows only 3 chars.
I spend the night browsing though the BIG small GREEN YeLlOw f0nt2 and all I want i to kick these people in the bottom. The problem is that they know how to do the stuff.

I guess usenet changed. Before it was RTFM in ascii, now it is l33t stuff in AJAX (or whatever is the most complicated, best looking thingie on the web) – and the answewrs are tough to find.

My point is that the world of “how to find help on Internet” has changed. Yo.

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In no way ‘technically inclined’ mind should imply rudeness. Open source is immature, they can write some code and feel that it is what it takes. No, it is not. User support, writing documentation, maintaining software is all work. Unfortunately they do not get paid AND have no actual subjective pleasure from it (which can appear in case of code crafting). So yes, they are very poor at that. I almost never have to read FAQs, it has to be in the online help system already. All of it. Do what it takes, but write it as if you would give it to your grandmother, clear, well presented, unambigous, full. There is no other way.
And besides that all, open source guys cannot be charged if something goes wrong - they have no responsibility, only their own good will.

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“Paul: I have no idea what forum you are visiting, but it sounds like either you spend your time trolling there or they are the most dysfunctional people ever.”

Whoops: I should make it clear that I am not having a conflict with them. I merely observed their behavior when perusing the discussion group looking to solve a problem that I had. I hope that the fact that I Google for things from time to time does not cause them to be rude to others (;P).

Today I went searching on Google for a solution to an issue I was having with their software under Windows Vista, and the first post I landed on, they were being rude to someone who had asked the same question. The original poster was sufficiently taken aback to reinforce the lead developer’s rudeness by apologizing needlessly, and in the end the answer to his question was only indirectly hinted at within one sentence out of several paragraphs of unnecessary rudeness. We all had to figure out the rest for ourselves.

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“I believe it’s pretty presumptuous to believe any self respecting newby would want to ask a question of snotty, self serving, assholes like you.”

Good. Because you are exactly the type of person we want to shoo away.