Re: How to ask questions?

[kirbyk]

Overall, I think I'd say don't sweat it so much.

There are some general tips - use a relevant subject line, be specific, include examples, and so forth. But once you put your question out there, it goes through the filter of an individual. Most of us end up getting good at a very narrow range of solutions - whose jobs give much time to really understand things that your company isn't using? Most of us only learn a few new things at once.

And that's part of the point of why we ask on places like this.

So, the effect is that your question gets filtered through everyone's personal query of "Can I solve this using the tools I have?" And if people can, or sort of can, or can if you squint at the problem set a little, they tend to post. Sometimes, their view into the problem is the one you want (and sometimes not the view you expected to want). More often, someone else's toolset is too far from your own to be useful. That's the nature of a vast collaborative site without the shared context of, say, an engineering department at a given company.

Factually wrong answers are another problem, but hard to solve - people probably aren't trying to be wrong. Hopefully someone else will come along before you fall down a rabbit hole from the misinformation, and both of you will learn something.