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Date:      Fri, 21 May 1999 17:02:11 -0700 (PDT)
From:      grog@FreeBSD.ORG (Greg Lehey)
To:        FreeBSD-questions@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   How to get best results from FreeBSD-questions
Message-ID:  <19990522000211.83F57152BC@hub.freebsd.org>

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How to get the best results from FreeBSD questions.
===================================================

Last update 23 February 1998

This is a regular posting to the FreeBSD questions mailing list.  If
you got it in answer to a message you sent, it means that the sender
thinks that at least one of the following things was wrong with your
message:

- You left out a subject line, or the subject line was not appropriate.
- You formatted it in such a way that it was difficult to read.
- You asked more than one unrelated question in one message.
- You sent out a message with an incorrect date, time or time zone.
- You sent out the same message more than once.
- You sent an 'unsubscribe' message to FreeBSD-questions.

If you have done any of these things, there is a good chance that you
will get more than one copy of this message from different people.
Read on, and your next message will be more successful.

This document is also available on the web at
http://www.lemis.com/questions.html.

=====================================================================

Contents:

I:    Introduction
II:   How to unsubscribe from FreeBSD-questions
III:  Should I ask -questions or -hackers?
IV:   How to submit a question to FreeBSD-questions
V:    How to answer a question to FreeBSD-questions

I: Introduction
===============

This is a regular posting aimed to help both those seeking advice from
FreeBSD-questions (the "newcomers"), and also those who answer the
questions (the "hackers").

       Note that the term "hacker" has nothing to do with break- ing
       into other people's computers.  The correct term for the latter
       activity is "cracker", but the popular press hasn't found out
       yet.  The FreeBSD hackers disapprove strongly of cracking
       security, and have nothing to do with it.

In the past, there has been some friction which stems from the
different viewpoints of the two groups.  The newcomers accused the
hackers of being arrogant, stuck-up, and unhelpful, while the hackers
accused the newcomers of being stupid, unable to read plain English,
and expecting everything to be handed to them on a silver platter.  Of
course, there's an element of truth in both these claims, but for the
most part these viewpoints come from a sense of frustration.

In this document, I'd like to do something to relieve this frustration
and help everybody get better results from FreeBSD-questions.  In the
following section, I recommend how to submit a question; after that,
we'll look at how to answer one.

II:  How to unsubscribe from FreeBSD-questions
==============================================

When you subscribed to FreeBSD-questions, you got a welcome message
from Majordomo@FreeBSD.ORG.  In this message, amongst other things, it
told you how to unsubscribe.  Here's a typical message:

  Welcome to the freebsd-questions mailing list!
  
  If you ever want to remove yourself from this mailing list,
  you can send mail to "Majordomo@FreeBSD.ORG" with the following command
  in the body of your email message:
  
      unsubscribe freebsd-questions Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.de>
  
  Here's the general information for the list you've
  subscribed to, in case you don't already have it:
  
  FREEBSD-QUESTIONS               User questions
  This is the mailing list for questions about FreeBSD.  You should not
  send "how to" questions to the technical lists unless you consider the
  question to be pretty technical.

Normally, unsubscribing is even simpler than the message suggests: you
don't need to specify your mail ID unless it is different from the one
which you specified when you subscribed.

If Majordomo replies and tells you (incorrectly) that you're not on
the list, this may mean one of two things:

  1.  You have changed your mail ID since you subscribed. That's where
      keeping the original message from majordomo comes in handy. For
      example, the sample message above shows my mail ID as
      grog@lemis.de. Since then, I have changed it to
      grog@lemis.com. If I were to try to remove grog@lemis.com from
      the list, it would fail: I would have to specify the name with
      which I joined.

  2.  You're subscribed to a mailing list which is subscribed to
      FreeBSD-questions. If that's the case, you'll have to figure out
      which one it is and get your name taken off that one. If you're
      not sure which one it might be, check the headers of the
      messages you receive from freebsd-questions: maybe there's a
      clue there.

If you've done all this, and you still can't figure out what's going
on, send a message to Postmaster@FreeBSD.org, and he will sort things
out for you. Don't send a message to FreeBSD-questions: they can't
help you.

III: Should I ask -questions or -hackers?
=========================================

Two mailing lists handle general questions about FreeBSD,
FreeBSD-questions and FreeBSD-hackers. In some cases, it's not really
clear which group you should ask. The following criteria should help
for 99% of all questions, however:

     If the question is of a general nature, ask
     FreeBSD-questions. Examples might be questions about intstalling
     FreeBSD or the use of a particular UNIX utility.

     If you think the question relates to a bug, but you're not sure,
     or you don't know how to look for it, send the message to
     FreeBSD-questions.

     If the question relates to a bug, and you're sure that it's a bug
     (for example, you can pinpoint the place in the code where it
     happens, and you maybe have a fix), then send the message to
     FreeBSD-hackers.

     If the question relates to enhancements to FreeBSD, and you can
     make suggestions about how to implement them, then send the
     message to FreeBSD-hackers.

There are also a number of other specialized mailing lists, for
example FreeBSD-isp, which caters to the interests of ISPs (Internet
Service Providers) who run FreeBSD. If you happen to be an ISP, this
doesn't mean you should automatically send your questions to
FreeBSD-isp. The criteria above still apply, and it's in your interest
to stick to them, since you're more likely to get good results that
way.

IV:  How to submit a question
=============================

When submitting a question to FreeBSD-questions, consider the
following points:

  1.  Remember that nobody gets paid for answering a FreeBSD
      question. They do it of their own free will.  You can influence
      this free will positively by submitting a well-formulated
      question supplying as much relevant information as possible. You
      can influence this free will negatively by submitting an
      incomplete, illegible, or rude question. It's perfectly possible
      to send a message to FreeBSD-questions and not get an answer
      even if you follow these rules. It's much more possible to not
      get an answer if you don't. In the rest of this document, we'll
      look at how to get the most out of your question to
      FreeBSD-questions.

  2.  Not everybody who answers FreeBSD questions reads every message:
      they look at the subject line and decide whether it interests
      them. Clearly, it's in your interest to specify a
      subject. ``FreeBSD problem'' or ``Help'' aren't enough. If you
      provide no subject at all, many people won't bother reading
      it. If your subject isn't specific enough, the people who can
      answer it may not read it.

  3.  Format your message so that it is legible, and PLEASE DON'T
      SHOUT!!!!!. We appreciate that a lot of people don't speak
      English as their first language, and we try to make allowances
      for that, but it's really painful to try to read a message
      written full of typos or without any line breaks. A lot of badly
      formatted messages come from bad mailers or badly configured
      mailers. The following mailers are known to send out badly
      formatted messages without you finding out about them:

      Eudora 
      exmh 
      Microsoft Exchange 
      Microsoft Internet Mail 
      Microsoft Outlook 
      Netscape 

      As you can see, the mailers in the Microsoft world are frequent
      offenders. If at all possible, use a UNIX mailer. If you must
      use a mailer under Microsoft environments, make sure it is set
      up correctly. Try not to use MIME: a lot of people use mailers
      which don't get on very well with MIME.

      For further information on this subject, check
      http://www.lemis.com/email.html.

  4.  Make sure your time and time zone are set correctly. This may
      seem a little silly, since your message still gets there, but
      many of the people you are trying to reach get several hundred
      messages a day. They frequently sort the incoming messages by
      subject and by date, and if your message doesn't come before the
      first answer, they may assume they missed it and not bother to
      look.

  5.  Don't include unrelated questions in the same message. Firstly,
      a long message tends to scare people off, and secondly, it's
      more difficult to get all the people who can answer all the
      questions to read the message.

  6.  Specify as much information as possible. This is a difficult
      area, and we need to expand on what information you need to
      submit, but here's a start:

         If you get error messages, don't say ``I get error
         messages'', say (for example) ``I get the error message 'No
         route to host'''.

         If your system panics, don't say ``My system panicked'', say
         (for example) ``my system panicked with the message 'free
         vnode isn't'''.

         If you have difficulty installing FreeBSD, please tell us
         what hardware you have. In particular, it's important to know
         the IRQs and I/O addresses of the boards installed in your
         machine.

         If you have difficulty getting PPP to run, describe the
         configuration. Which version of PPP do you use? What kind of
         authentication do you have? Do you have a static or dynamic
         IP address? What kind of messages do you get in the log file?

  7.  If you do all this, and you still don't get an answer, there
     could be other reasons. For example, the problem is so
     complicated that nobody knows the answer, or the person who does
     know the answer was offline. If you don't get an answer after,
     say, a week, it might help to re-send the message. If you don't
     get an answer to your second message, though, you're probably not
     going to get one from this forum.  Resending the same message
     again and again will only make you unpopular.

To summarize, let's assume you know the answer to the following
question (yes, it's the same one in each case :-). You choose which of
these two questions you would be more prepared to answer:


Message 1:
Subject: (none)

I just can't get hits damn silly FereBSD system to workd, and Im really good at this tsuff, but I have never seen anythign sho difficult to install, it jst wont work whatever I try so why don't y9ou guys tell me what I doing wrong.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message 2:
Subject: Problems installing FreeBSD

I've just got the FreeBSD 2.1.5 CD-ROM from Walnut Creek, and I'm
having a lot of difficulty installing it.  I have a 66 MHz 486 with 16
MB of memory and an Adaptec 1540A SCSI board, a 1.2GB Quantum Fireball
disk and a Toshiba 3501XA CD-ROM drive.  The installation works just
fine, but when I try to reboot the system, I get the message "Missing
Operating System".

----------------------------------------------------------------------


V: How to answer a question
===========================

Before you answer a question to FreeBSD-questions, consider:

1.  A lot of the points on submitting questions also apply to
    answering questions.  Read them.

2.  Has somebody already answered the question?  The easiest way to
    check this is to sort your incoming mail by subject: then
    (hopefully) you'll see the question followed by any answers, all
    together.

    If somebody has already answered it, it doesn't automatically mean
    that you shouldn't send another answer.  But it makes sense to
    read all the other answers first.

3.  Do you have something to contribute beyond what has already been
    said?  In general, "Yeah, me too" answers don't help much,
    although there are exceptions, like when somebody is describing a
    problem he's having, and he doesn't know whether it's his fault or
    whether there's something wrong with the hardware or software.  If
    you do send a "me too" answer, you should also include any further
    relevant information.

4.  Are you sure your answer is correct?  If not, wait a day or so.
    If nobody else comes up with a better answer, you can still reply
    and say, for example, "I don't know if this is correct, but since
    nobody else has replied, why don't you try replacing your ATAPI
    CD-ROM with a frog?".

5.  Don't do a group reply; lots of people send messages with hundreds
    of CCs.  Unless there's a good reason to do otherwise, just reply
    to the person and copy FreeBSD-questions.

6.  Trim the original message to the minimum, and use some technique
    to identify which text came from the original message, and which
    text you add.  I personally find that prepending "> " to the
    original message works best.  Leaving white space after the ">"
    and leave empty lines between your text and the original text both
    make the result more readable.

    Most mailers change the subject line on a reply by prepending a
    text such as "Re: ".  If your mailer doesn't do it automatically,
    you should do it manually.

    If the submitter didn't abide by format conventions (lines too
    long, inappropriate subject line), *please* fix it.  In the case
    of an incorrect subject line (such as "HELP!!??"), change the
    subject line to (say) "Re: Difficulties with sync PPP (was:
    HELP!!??)".  That way other people trying to follow the thread
    will have less difficulty following it.

    In such cases, it's appropriate to say what you did and why you
    did it, but try not to be rude.  If you find you can't answer
    without being rude, don't answer.

    If you just want to reply to a message because of its bad format,
    just reply to the submitter, not to the list.  You can just send
    him this message in reply, if you like.


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