Asking For Help Online

As an extra resource, each of the projects have mailing lists available for people to ask for help. While this is generally helpful, it has also resulted in several people becoming very frustrated for a variety of reasons:

Multiple messages asking the same questions over and over along with the accompanying "RTFM" replies, occasionally followed by another reply wanting to know where the manual is or more often an indignant response flaming everyone in sight.
Multiple messages sent to the list asking to be subscribed. (See Majordomo is our friend.)
Multiple messages asking to be unsubscribed, which always begs the question, "How'd they get subscribed in the first place?". (See Majordomo is our friend.)
Messages cross-posted to multiple lists, or posted to the same list multiple times in a brief period.

There are other issues which arise, but since these are most commonly attributed to new users, these are what I'm going to deal with first. The most important thing to keep in mind is that the Internet is as much a community as the street you live on. There are rules of conduct that have developed over many years of people being online, but with the staggering growth of people coming online in just the last couple years many times these rules are not known or understood by new users. Below are a few guidelines to remember:

Be courteous. All too often it is easy to forget that you are talking to another person online, not a machine.

Be patient. While email is markedly faster than postal mail, it is still going to take a little time for someone else to read and respond.

Be thoughtful. If you have a question, odds are it's been asked before and is online somewhere. Mail lists should be used after you have looked elsewhere.

Be thorough. The more pertinent information you include, the more likely you'll get an answer that means something. There's a big difference between "I can't send email!" and "I can't get Mail Program 6.1 to connect with my SMTP server." The more relevant information you include, the more likely you'll get an answer that means something. The general idea is to give as much important information as succinctly as possible. When in doubt, give a little more rather than less, but try not to put so much unrelated information in that people aren't going to read the whole letter. Think like a newspaper story, lots of important info, very little space.

Be concise. Get to the point quickly. Some people have too much email to keep up with to sit through page after page of rambling story before getting to the problem. Odds are, they'll just go to the next message.

Use headers, and use them meaningfully. Let me give you an example. Say your question deals with user-land PPP dropping a connection every few minutes and you're running FreeBSD 3.1 instead of the current release. A message sent to FreeBSD-questions would have a header similar to "User PPP-FBSD 3.1 disconnects often". I can't stress this point enough. This really falls under being thorough. A message with no header or a header that is frivolous is just as likely to be deleted without being read as anything. The first assumption is a toss-up between assuming it's spam, or someone that doesn't know how to subscribe to the list.

Send to one list and one list only. Cross-posting is a sure-fire way to annoy a lot of people really fast. (See Spam.)

Make sure you are sending to the correct list. Each list has a description stating it's purpose and what should be posted to it. Take that extra thirty seconds to read it, and save yourself from being flamed. When in doubt, go with your best guess, but be polite about it. If you're not sure it's the right place, make sure you mention that at the start of your post. Only the truly crass will yell at someone who's making an obvious effort to learn the right way to do things.

Type normally. (I hear the resounding "Huh?'s"....) Many times new users will type something ALL IN CAPS IN AN EFFORT TO STAND OUT. This is BAD. When was the last time you saw a postal letter typed all in caps? In an online community forced to express itself with words and visual clues, typing in all caps has long been seen as yelling or shouting. Think of trying to read a lot of messages in all caps as being the same as standing in a crowded room with everyone talking at once. They have the same effect, namely a headache for anyone trying to endure it.

Make sure the message is formatted for plain text, not HTML. The most blatant offenders for this one are Outlook Express and Netscape Communicator (and Navigator) because HTML is set as default for message text. There are several problems with HTML in email. First, it's slow. That makes it expensive for everyone else on the list. Second, no matter how nifty those colors look on your screen, they may be totally illegible on everyone else's. Third, not everyone has a mail program that can read HTML. Plain text is the standard, the fastest, the most readable, and the easiest for everyone. (See Formatting your email.)

Finally, think before you send. Most of these guidelines are just common sense issues, but they don't cover every situation. Before you hit that send button, look back at what you've written. Is there something you've put in it that is going to result in annoying not just the list, but yourself as well?

I know, that list looks pretty long, but take the time to think on these things. It will save a lot of frustration on both sides of a message, as well as keeping tempers under check. If you feel yourself getting frustrated, take a few minutes away from the computer. Calm down, and when you come back think before you act. Yes, computers can be frustrating, we've all been there. But, by keeping it calm, you'll make things much easier for yourself and those you're asking for help.

Back to main page