Asking a Good Question

[Siddharth Rout]

I am worried how a new user is usually treated in our forums. The comments are harsh and rude. The most common scenario is when a user joins a forum and asks a question and then is surprised when he or she gets replies like

1. Is this a Joke?
2. Are you creating a virus?
3. Have you searched google?
4. Lol. Please improve your question

etc...

Seriously??????

We tend to forget that we were newbies once and there were few kind people who helped us sail through our learning curve.

We may have found a cure for most evils but we have not found any remedy for the worst of them all... The apathy of homo sapiens!!!

What are your thoughts and how do you think we can improve this?

Also, if you wish, post here what you feel is a good question and how should it be asked. I intend to create a post which will describe on "How to ask a good question?" and will base it on what you guys provides here as input.

Let's make VBF a better place

[Niya]

Bonnie has a cool idea. I notice in his(or her?) visitor's message section have stock responses for things that come up regularly like a user not being informative enough with a question or telling them to resolve their thread. I haven't been here that long but I do post here regularly and after a while you start to notice that certain things come up repeatedly and its usually a pain to repeat what you have said many times before so after a while, the tone of your responses may change as repeating things can get really tedious.

I'm speaking for me though. Look at it this way, if someone asked you today how to turn of their computer, you will explain to them in no harsh terms. They may ask again tomorrow and you may answer nicely. If they continued asking every day, by the tenth time, you may will be bitey. Its like that. Now I know that these are different people posting on the forum but its the repetition that's annoying.

I think there's a complacency with long time members when it comes to this. I noticed that new users who come here to help are always quite patient and understanding, I know I was when I just arrived. I think this has to do with the fact that they haven't yet had to deal with the same annoyances over and over again like users not providing enough info in their questions. For example, when users didn't use code tags in their OP, I used to copy it into the IDE to get the indentation and repost so it would be easier to read, along with a note to the OP to use the tags to make their code easier to read. I did this quite a few times when I had just arrived here but having to do this over and over again got old really fast. Today, I just ignore posts with hard to read code unless the code is small enough to understand without indentation.

Its no excuse to be harsh with new users but I'm just highlighting where I think this apathy on our part comes from. Some form of stock responses might be a good idea. As I said Bonnie has some, I presume to avoid the tedium of having to repeat stuff. You just copy and paste and move on.

[Siddharth Rout]

>If they continued asking every day, by the tenth time, you may will be bitey. Its like that.

True. In such a case, it is always best to get up from your seat, have a cup of coffee or move on to another post. Let someone else reply to that. OR be patient and copy paste a predefined "Polite" message asking the user to edit the question. This predefined message can also contain a link to well written pre-defined post which educates the user on how to ask good questions

Regarding "How to ask good quesitons?" do you have any thoughts/recommendations?

[bodessia]

I am a new member and I have been treated very nicely.

[FunkyDexter]

I think there's a complacency with long time members when it comes to this

Yeah, you definitely get jaded after a while.

Sid, the one "bad response" example you gave there that I do think is often valid was "Are you trying to write a virus?". There are time's I've seen a question from a fairly new member (maybe 10 or 20 posts to their name) that looks decidedly dodgy. Examples are someone asking how SQL injection works or whether its possible to take over someone's desktop remotely. If I see that I usually do a quick search for other posts from that member. If there's a pattern of dodginess I'll respond quite harshly because, bluntly, I want to give them a bit of a scare in those circumstances. If I don't see such a pattern I'll keep it more civil, explain that I won't answer because it's an open forum and the information could be used for malicious purposes and leave it at that. Even when I'm being polite I'm hoping I'll discourage others from responding.

Other than that I fully support what you're saying. It's nice to be nice and I don't think posting a harsh response to a badly formed post has ever made me feel better about myself.

edit>

Regarding "How to ask good quesitons?" do you have any thoughts/recommendations?

There's actually an excellent guide on the forum already. TG's How to remove the eels from your hovercraft. If that could somehow be given more prominence it could only be a good thing. Of course, the real challlenge is in getting people to read it. You could probably print it of, go round people's houses and thrust it through their letterbox and they'd still title their first post "Help, I need somebody".

[szlamany]

Maybe an admin should simply down-rate a post that they feel is harsh - thus teaching the forum users how to behave. They would have to up-rate that same person as they got better...

imo - knocking someone down is entirely counterproductive to a teaching/learning environment - it bothers me so much to see it...

[edit] - I went to EDIT the post to add a bit more and got this popup [/edit]

[Siddharth Rout]

@funkyDexter. Yes, asking "Are you creating a virus?" is a perfectly normal question but it depends when do you actually say it. If the user has mentioned in detail what he or she is trying to do and you know FOR SURE that it will be used maliciously then yes it is perfectly normal to ask. But if a user has just given a hint which may or may not have anything to do with a malicious code then the user will not take that question in the right manner. I won't. So it is better to probe the user politely and then once you are sure, go ahead and comment.

Also if you feel that the user displays a "pattern of dodginess", instead of being harsh, report and downvote the post. I am sure the mods will take care of that. Being "Harsh" will only promote more complications

[Siddharth Rout]

@szlamany: I stopped using MSE long time ago. I agree with your logic of knocking someone down. But that "Knocking Down" doesn't need to be harsh/impolite. You can do that with politeness as well

@funkyDexter: Just saw your edit. Yup THAT is indeed a good article. So we can actually mention that in our comments rather than just keeping it in our signatures and hoping that the user will read it.

[brad jones]

I few quick comments --

• I often say be constructive not destructive with your comments.
• Remember to give the benefit of the doubt
• Not everyone speaks English as their primary language, so some "harsh" or poorly worded questions are simply translation errors.
• Nothing requires you to respond. If you don't like how a person has worded a question, you can always move on and ignore it.
• Responses like "go search Google" or "have you searched the forum" on their own are not very helpful. In many cases it is obvious that they didn't, so siply saying that is of little value. Working that into a helpful response makes more sense. When you think about it, the person took more effort creating an account and posting a question than it would have taken to search, so they deserve a little slack since they obviously haven't taken the easiest path to get an answer!

As to the suggestion of writing a post to help explain how to write a good question - the people who write the poor questions aren't going to read that. We've added the crazy tooltip onto the post button. That's as "in your face" as we can get at forcing someone to read. We could possibly hack the forum to include a "posters agreement" the first time someone posts, but that is a coding change I'd prefer to avoid.

Bottom line - I think it is great to always put myself in the position of the person posting. How would I interpret the responses given if I were them. I agree that there are times when the responses are a bit unnecessary and can be considered very uninviting. On the flip side, there are a lot of times when members here go beyond the level of tolerance I'd ever have expected! Ultimately, we are each responsible for our own responses and posts.

[techgnome]

We tend to forget that we were newbies once and there were few kind people who helped us sail through our learning curve.

Yeah, we were noobs once... and there weren't ANYONE around back then to help me through my learning curve. and I think that's where some of the perceived rudeness comes from. WE read BOOKS, Documents, Help Files... there was no internet, there was no google, heck, there wasn't even MSDN. First language I learned (past Apple & PC BASIC), which was Pascal, I learned on my own, by reading the Reference Guide... Not even a tutorial.. the REFERENCE GUIDE! Do you know how DRY that stuff is?! Point is that a lot of us that have been doing this for more than 15 years or so had to suffer through that learning curve BY READING OTHER PEOPLE'S stuff... the hard way. And when some one comes along and asks how to do something that a 5 second search on Google could give you (and I know this because often that's what I do, take part of their question and paste it into Google) it really cheeses me off. Granted there are times when the person isn't using the right words to search on, I will grant that sometimes you need to know what to search for in the first place, and someone new may not know the correct terms, but when there's a post "how do i use a timer?" ... really? Now they're just being lazy.

at the same time, I sometimes I wonder if too many people think the world is rainbows and unicorns... let me tell you those unicorns are MEAN! And they are NOT afraid to use those horns in ways I'm sure they were not intended. And as for the rainbows... they're an illusion. A side effect from all the coffee consumed.

And I'll admit I've been harsh in some posts... and in some cases, it pissed off the OP... fine, what ever. In other cases, it's exactly what they needed, a good slap in the face to wake up. But I can also tell you that for every post where I was hard on someone, there are probably another 10 where I had to sit on my hands and clamp my mouth shut to prevent me from doing something truly stupid that I may or may not regret. And that's the reason that I have a mental "ignore" list that when I see posts from a certain group of posters, I ignore them. Skip right over their posts. Because I know that if I open it and start to read it...

There are some post that when I read them, scares the dung heap out of me. I'm taking better care of myself these days so that I don't have to worry about having to need a pacemaker because I see some of the posts I pray that I don't need a pacemaker programmed by one of these posters... that's how bad it feels sometimes. And yes, I'll grant there are a lot of hobbyists here, as well as people just trying to get through the class even though they don't want to do this... but there is also a large number of day to day "professionals" here... I don't even want to think about it.

@Funky - i'm past jaded. I've moved on to the tarnished and cynical stage.


-tg

[Niya]

Yeah, we were noobs once... and there weren't ANYONE around back then to help me through my learning curve. and I think that's where some of the perceived rudeness comes from. WE read BOOKS, Documents, Help Files... there was no internet, there was no google, heck, there wasn't even MSDN. First language I learned (past Apple & PC BASIC), which was Pascal, I learned on my own, by reading the Reference Guide... Not even a tutorial.. the REFERENCE GUIDE! Do you know how DRY that stuff is?! Point is that a lot of us that have been doing this for more than 15 years or so had to suffer through that learning curve BY READING OTHER PEOPLE'S stuff... the hard way.

This a very good point as well. I've been coding since the early 90s and I went through that as well. Aspiring programmers have it so unbelievably easy today and this breeds a certain type of laziness.

For example, I've seen a fair amount of questions here where beginners attempt to call a method on a reference type that's set to Nothing. Would it kill you to read up on these concepts and experiment with what the docs say ? I have about 100 folders of .Net projects that were all the result of experimenting to learn. Everything from delegates, LINQ, generics to threading and file access. I never needed to ask on any forum how to return a value from the Function keyword or how to use inheritance. I read the docs and made projects to experiment. Even this very morning, I learned how to use UPnP to forward ports. I read what examples I could find and created a small project to play around with it so I can see what works and what doesn't, what limits I have.

In my mind, there's really no excuse in the information age to not understand why your code is throwing a NullReferenceException. Its the easiest problem to solve. I can excuse someone not understanding LINQ, inheritance, threading, interfaces or delegates. But come on, you shouldn't have something as basic as null reference errors giving you so much trouble that you'd need to actually ask why your code is not working especially when I see that you're working with DataTables and SQLConnections, things that are infinitely more complicated. This betrays a serious lack of fundamental understanding. It tells me that you're prone to taking shortcuts and never took the time to properly learn the basics of programming. These people couldn't make it in the early 90s.

[szlamany]

not understanding LINQ, inheritance, threading, interfaces or delegates.

Why a fixed list of what you tolerate? Maybe these noobs we are discussing really need to know how a function returns a value. Maybe they come from JavaScript and don't understand something basic in a new language.

Don't we have to put ourselves in that other persons shoes?

[Siddharth Rout]

>Nothing requires you to respond. If you don't like how a person has worded a question, you can always move on and ignore it.

@Brad: You couldn't have put it better!

@Tg: I understand where you are coming from. Even I went through a tough time before I joined VBF but that doesn't mean that I give the same treatment to others? No one needs a slap!

As Brad says, "Nothing requires you to respond." So if one chooses to respond then do it nicely. We don't want the user to feel insulted and rushing off to another forum! I agree there are some users who want the code to be served on a platter and I am happy to let them go but there are plenty others who joined a forum for the first time and they don't know how to properly ask as question. I am targeting that sect which can be converted and retained

[Niya]

Why a fixed list of what you tolerate? Maybe these noobs we are discussing really need to know how a function returns a value. Maybe they come from JavaScript and don't understand something basic in a new language.

Don't we have to put ourselves in that other persons shoes?

The things I listed are quite complicated in their own right and as such I don't expect newbs to grasp them right away, in fact, I'd be surprised if they did. However, with the exception of the students that come here, a lot of these newbs usually have some experience. Some of them are already toying around with ADO.Net or graphics. They understand loops and If...Thens. Some have even written simple apps. At this level you shouldn't have to be asking about simple things like null reference exceptions. At this level, you shouldn't be adding strings to integers and asking why you're not getting proper results. I never had those problems when I was at their level or rather I should say, I had those problems but figured them out on my own without too much trouble.

To use an analogy, its like a guy who wants to learn to drive asking how to open the door. He may not know, but it would take him no long time to notice the door has a handle and from there he should be able to reason on his own that its probably the thing that opens the door. It wouldn't take too much time to try pulling it to see if he's right. Its too simple a problem that you cannot figure it out on your own. The problem with teaching this person should be obvious. Its going to make teaching them to drive a monumental task since you have to explain every little tiny thing that may not even involve driving the car. Can you imagine having to tell him how to buckle the seat belt, unbuckle it, throw back the seat, turn the mirror. Its would be a much easier task to teach someone who already knows how to reason out these simple things on their own because you can focus on teaching them how to actually drive.

[techgnome]

Why a fixed list of what you tolerate? Maybe these noobs we are discussing really need to know how a function returns a value. Maybe they come from JavaScript and don't understand something basic in a new language.

Don't we have to put ourselves in that other persons shoes?

And after how many posts of you saying "return the value" do you need to do? there's a thread around here somewhere where someone was asking a question on plugins.. they had followed the example... which output to the debug window... they kept asking how to get it to do something "without writing it out" ... four posts later I still couldn't get them to understand that they just needed to make it a funciton and return a value... clearly they've got SOME experience in this realm, they're not a complete noob. I eventually had to unsubvscribe from the thread because had I continued in it, I might have punched someone in the shnoz.

@Sid - oh, yes, there are some people that need that slap... I'll even admit sometimes I'm the one that needs it... generally speaking, the person that need the smack acknowledges it... The people that take offence aren't even the target.

-tg

[Siddharth Rout]

>I'll even admit sometimes I'm the one that needs it...

@tg: No. You don't. And that is the whole point

[brad jones]

I've not kept up with every post in this thread, but I wanted to add another comment to the discussion. A key point has been to "put yourself in the shoes" of the person posting.

A comment was made about repeating something multiple times because someone wasn't getting it. The addition thing to consider is that the person you are interacting with might not have that much experience. I'm not talking coding, I'm talking life. Remember, this is an open forum. As such, anyone can come here.

While it might be a shocker, we've had kids -- yes kids -- posting questions on this forum. Consider that the person asking you these basic questions might be a 13 year old learning to program. In this case, they might not understand basic concepts and it might take repeating and explaining things a few times. The key to remember is that VB is a great language. One of the things that makes it great is that it is easily approachable by anyone. This includes kids.

< of course.... >
of course, many of the people that seem unable to think are not kids.

<and to add...>
But to another point (and sorry if this was stated). Most of the people who are asking you to give them the code or want the answer with no work are likely taking a class and will most likely never come back. The ones that are more likely to become long-standing members of the community are those that are actually interested in learning and understanding.

Regardless, we need to set the right tone for the forums - which I believe was the core objective of the OP.

Brad!

[Shaggy Hiker]

Sometimes I am afraid to give a rep to FD because I so totally agree with what he has said that I fear I might be him and I shouldn't rep myself. Whenever I see somebody asking a question that appears dodgy, I too, review their other posts to get a feel for what they are doing.

I did a small amount of teaching. One of the items that we had to teach was something known as a stage micrometer. This is a scale etched into the eyepiece of a microscope that allows people to measure the size of whatever they are viewing. The scale has no numbers on it, nor could it, because the eyepiece is only one part of the magnification in a microscope, and using a different lens would produce a different level of magnification. Therefore, you have to calibrate the scale. I would tell the students that this would be on the test. Nonetheless, across all the classes (mine and others), more than 50% couldn't do that calibration and would get the question wrong. I kept trying to come up with different ways to teach that concept to get the idea across. Some people understood it one way, others understood it a different way, others never seemed to come close to grasping the concept. I was able to get the success rate on that up over 50%, but never above 70-80%.

There are some concepts that some people are simply going to struggle with. You can try to approach the problem from different angles, and if you try enough, it might get through, but there is never a guarantee that the way you understand something is the way that others will understand it. Sometimes, you just can't win.

[FunkyDexter]

Sometimes I am afraid to give a rep to FD

Get over it

[szlamany]

This post - and the first reply - how was that helpful?

http://www.vbforums.com/showthread.p...l-with-vs-2010

[brad jones]

This post - and the first reply - how was that helpful?

http://www.vbforums.com/showthread.p...l-with-vs-2010

I don't see how it was. I think that the "code tag" comment could confuse the poster and give them a bad experience here. A simple ("side comment: please use the code tag to make your post easier to read" type comment would have been more beneficial and less 'negative'.

I'm on to sure how the google link helps, but I didn't look at the question that closely.

[szlamany]

I agree - the link to a gmail login doesn't help.

Problem is that when I come across a thread like this I am even less interested in getting involved - as there is already an off-topic rant starting.

[abhijit]

When I joined, Google did not exist. VB6 was the latest technology and we were developing on VB4 and moving to VB 6. We skipped 5 for some reason. We had no material other than some books. So questions like "Have you used a search engine?" did not apply. Now some of the newbie questions usually fall into a category where several examples are available on searching online.

[Arve K.]

Sometimes when I ask a question, I got a 'have-you-tried-to-google'-kind of responce. Yes, I always try to google and use MSDN before I ask a question, but sometimes the results don't give me the answer I am looking for, meaning I don't understand it, or I'm not quite sure what keywords I should use in my search. Therefor I think it is easier to come here to present my problem, and most of you guys here really put on some really good answers, giving me clues to what I need to do to solve whatever problem I am struggeling with.

And it may not show on my post count, but I have spent a lot of hours here killing time and browsing the forums, and I have seen - in my humble opinion - way to many posts where the OP (and others) have been "harassed" by some of our more skillfull members. Not a big fan of this behaviour...

Heck, if we always should use, and always would find, answers to our coding problems on google, then what's the purpose of this forum?

[techgnome]

Sometimes when I ask a question, I got a 'have-you-tried-to-google'-kind of responce. Yes, I always try to google and use MSDN before I ask a question, but sometimes the results don't give me the answer I am looking for, meaning I don't understand it, or I'm not quite sure what keywords I should use in my search. Therefor I think it is easier to come here to present my problem, and most of you guys here really put on some really good answers, giving me clues to what I need to do to solve whatever problem I am struggeling with.

And it may not show on my post count, but I have spent a lot of hours here killing time and browsing the forums, and I have seen - in my humble opinion - way to many posts where the OP (and others) have been harassed by some of our more skillfull members. Not a big fan of this behaviour...

Heck, if we always should use, and always would find, answers to our coding problems on google, then what's the purpose of this forum?

If someone has at least done SOME footwork in searching and still didn't find what they are looking for... then they should say so... even if they dont' get the stock "well did you even try to search" answer (because quite frankly, I think the number that don't search outnumbers those that do) ... if they at least say so, then we know they've put forth some effort and are more likely to really learn. Sometimes they've got hte wrong search terms, and they just need to be pushed in the right direction. The other danger of not saying you did a search is duplicate info... If I think you haven't done the search, and I have to do it for you, I'm likely to post the same links you already found ,read and dismissed... but I don't know that... now you've wasted my time. And that's where some of us get cheesed... like some how the OP's time is more important than the rest of us that they can't be bothered to take their question, paste it into Google and hit the button. Half the time, I take their subject line and just search on that! The rest of the time it's the key words out of their first couple of sentences.

I don't post questions very often... but when I do, it's because I'm either seeking advice, or I've exhausted all other options in solving the problem. Either way, I've done searches, and so I mention this, so that no one has to waste their time doing the same searches.

I don't think we're asking a lot... just some common courtesy on both sides. Do a little bit of leg work, provide some details. Don't just walk into the doc's office and say "it hurts"and expect us to know what the problem is and how to fix it. I try to give people the benefit of the doubt at time... but if I simply ignored every post w/o furhter prompting the OP for more info or what ever... I'd probably never post again.. then again, maybe that's not such a bad thing after all.

-tg

[Shaggy Hiker]

Well, judging by your picture in your avatar (that is you, right?), you're kind of young, so we'd understand missing a few search terms.

Heck, I'm impressed that you can even type at that age.

[brad jones]

_Powerade_ - thanks for 'unlurking' and commenting. I think you are more reflective of the majority of "power users" (versus power posters) that come to the site.

[dee-u]

[*]Nothing requires you to respond. If you don't like how a person has worded a question, you can always move on and ignore it.

That sums up my attitude. I am one of those who prefer that we should just leave threads which we cannot say anything worthy or that if we are just going to bash it.

[Arve K.]

Heck, I'm impressed that you can even type at that age.

Guess that makes me unique and special