[thelist] The Tao of asking questions on thelist

Daniel J. Cody djc at members.evolt.org
Tue Nov 20 09:40:44 CST 2001


Hey George :)

I just wanted to touch on a couple of your points..

George Dillon <> Evolt! wrote:


> 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.


i would say monday is the worst time for asking questions. the majority 
of people are just too busy catching up from the weekend to provide 
in-depth answers. if i had to say the best day, it would be friday. the 
only reason for that is maybe people are sitting around the office 
waiting to leave, looking for anything to do :)


> 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.:


i couldn't agree with this more. although long posts *can be* beneficial 
and helpfull, more often than not, they address things outside the 
original question in such amounts that the question gets lost in the 
noise. if the long post is long because its going in depth about the 
problem, its more likely too be read. if a long post is long because it 
skips around and addresses points other than the question, its less 
likely to be read.

if you think about it, i'd say 50% of the people on this list read a 
message based on the subject(i know i do most of the time). if the 
subject is something which i may want to read about, and i open the 
message up only to find a 5 page dissertation about the way someone may 
be doing something without regard to their question(question about 'How 
do I do this in Netscape 4.x?' comes back with a reply about how shitty 
NS4 is and standards and blah-blah), the [del] key gets hit pretty fast.

90% of the time, people *are* looking for a quick answer when asking a 
quick question.

anyways, i'm notorious myself for blabbing on, so i'll cut it short here 
with one final thing..

If someone asks a question and you don't get a reply, don't take it 
personally. :) Wait 3-5 days and ask again politely.. Perhaps the person 
or people who may have the answer to your question were busy the first 
time it was asked, or simply didn't see it. But don't get discouraged 
and don't give up :)

.djc.







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