Xarg blog Archive

Please be very hesitant to write mails to private adresses of people you know answering questions in public forums. Don't expect them to react dutifully on unsolicited personal mails. Start asking in the suggested public forums and only send material to private mail addresses if asked to do so. Asking on a public list will enable everybody to learn from the given answers. It increases your chance to get a quick response, as there might be different people watching the list fit for giving advice. Remember, this is a volunteer service. Sometimes people are tired to answer. Can you imagine that someone might feel molested by receiving 20 - 30 personal mails per day, asking the same questions about printing over and over again? It is OK to ask the questions -- but keep it voluntary for your advisors, as it is the case, if you ask in the following public forums or on mailing lists:

One corrollary to the LazyWeb idea is that there is tremendous value in public dialogue, which personal email definitely is not. Mailing lists plus a search engine are pretty potent way to store the wisdom and hard work of the people actually solving problems. Of course, the other trick is that the people answering questions need to make an effort to get the answers out into a public forum as well. I still go to google first when I have a problem (and to Usenet really, rather than the web).

There are some tricks to making answers more valuable. One is to provide a little context along with the answer. Another is to make sure that if there is an error message that shows up when the problem manifests then quote it along with the answer (since a lot of people will just search with the text of the error message to try to find solutions). Also, if someone asks the same question again try to point them to the canonical answer so that if someone provides a better solution or your answer is wrong it's more likely people will end up with the best solution.