[thelist] The Tao of asking questions on thelist (was Protecting against ... sp at m)

George Dillon <> Evolt! evolt at georgedillon.com
Tue Nov 20 05:49:47 CST 2001


Sorry about this ramble - almost a rant, really - penance (tip) below.

<ramble speaking="if (strictly){rant}">

I recently replied to a list question off-list and got this in return:

> Thanks for the reply. I was beginning to feel like I was
> blacklisted or have bad breath, as this was the third posting to
> Evolt that I recieved absolutely no response to whatsoever. Not
> that I'm greedy, but c'mon! ;-)

Intrigued, and having had the same paranoid (and frustrated) feelings on
several past occasions, I searched my archive of evolt messages for the said
unanswered postings, and was surprised to find that I had to go back some
way to find one and that before I did I found numerous courteous and helpful
replies to other people from this complainant.

I thought maybe it was how they had formulated their questions, or maybe
their questions have no answer!

I've sometimes thought that certain days of the week are bad days for asking
questions, as are certain times of day but I don't know if this is really
true.

Writing questions can be quite an art.  Most list guidelines say, and it's
not just good netiquette but a good tactic for getting replies, that the
most important thing is to keep the question as short and as precise as
possible.  I used to think that by giving as much info as possible, and
anticipating all the possible incomplete answers I was making it more likely
that someone would give me the magic bullet...

WRONG!

Long messages (like this one) are simply less likely to get read, or if they
are they will be skimmed.  So the thing is to cut out everything that is not
essential to the question and if the explanation of the problem is
moderately long, repeat and flag your question clearly, e.g.:

Q. What is the answer to this question?

Over-simplification is not so bad as over-elaboration - the worst that can
happen is that people will respond with answers that don't exactly fit your
problem or they will ask you for more info... either way, you've got that
extended helping hand and you can then explain your problem in more detail
to them (off-list if necessary).

But having said all that, I could see nothing wrong with the aforementioned
unanswered post... so I guess shit just happens sometimes.

</rant>

As for the particular unanswered question... It was actually extremely
well-formulated and I remembered reading it and thinking the questions
raised were of vital concern to us all (as the problem could hit any one of
us at any time) and I expected a flurry of replies... so why were there
none?  I don't know.  Maybe the word SPAM in the title put people off
reading it at all (or even had the message blocked).

So... (with apologies for breaching list guidelines)... here it is again...

<question type="recycled and slightly pruned">

> My client is receiving irate replies from victims of a spammer
> who is using randomly-generated mailbox names under her domain.
>
> We all know you can type whatever REPLY-TO address you want to
> into just about any client or webmail app... and also that
> end-users are uninterested in looking at mail headers to
> fingerprint the actual source of an email.
>
> The message content included a clickthrough to <badurl here>
> which was there last week and gone now (no surprise there.)
>
> Question:
>
> 1) Is there *any* recourse whatsoever for this kind of thing?

</question>

<tip type="browser">

Want to quickly test pages in a ver3 browser (to see how your doodads
don't), but don't want ie3 or nn3 screwing with your later versions?

Unlike other supposedly tiny browsers, OffbyOne does NOT rely the IE engine
and come as a download of just 420k!

>From their site: http://offbyone.com/

"The Off By One Web Browser may be the world's smallest and fastest Web
Browser with full HTML 3.2 support. It is a completely self-contained,
stand-alone 1.1MB application with no dependencies on any other browser or
browser component. For Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT and
Windows 2000."

As one would expect, Fred Langa ( http://www.langalist.com ) reports it to
be "very parsimonious in its use of system resources: On a test system here,
the OffByOne browser consumed only about 3% of system resources in use,
versus 13% for Navigator and 6% for IE."

It's also now in the evolt browser archive: http://browsers.evolt.org/

</tip>





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