

The conversations are made up, but every single one of them is taken directly from situations I've seen. QBuddy and AFriend will have simulated conversations showing the right and wrong way to get good answers quickly.

Question Buddy and Answer Friend will be helping us out by illustrating the principles in the guide.

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You'll notice a distinct IRC and Mac flavor to the guide, but the ideas should be true for any topic in any context. Getting a reply of rtfm! is considered failure, no better than no reply at all, and getting advice that solves your problem is success. This guide will walk you through ten basic things you can do to increase the chances of getting answers, and increase the quality of the answers you get. I'll completely ignore boring stuff like the proper way to greet people or when to read the topic. The goal of the article is to get answers to your questions, nothing more and nothing less. It's a handy companion to this one, although more geared towards the nitty gritty of IRC etiquette and less towards the actual questions.Īnd so I present to you Getting Answers. While it's great for people who hang out and answer a lot of questions, and helps them deal with the titular Vampires, it's not something that's very useful for a person asking questions.Īnother guide I just discovered is Getting help on IRC. Help Vampires: A Spotter's Guide is great, but it's written from the other side. If you're pointed at a guide with a filename of smart-questions, that means this person thinks you have stupid questions, and who needs that?
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How To Ask Questions The Smart Way is pretty condescending, especially if you already feel insulted by somebody telling you that you need help asking questions. My goal is to avoid those problems and make something that's directly useful to you, the person with problems, rather than something that's mostly useful for the people answering the questions. Other people have written articles on this subject before, but they suffer from problems. Please leave your comments on this article in the blog post. If you're in a hurry, you can skip the boring introduction and go straight to the guide. This guide will show you ten easy things you can do to ensure your questions are answered quickly and well. As a person asking questions, there are some simple things you can do to help your chances of getting good answers. They get no answers, poor answers, or absorb a lot of verbal abuse. I hang out in several programmer related chats and forums and I see a lot of people having trouble getting answers.
