I'll give my opinion about this as well. Please note that I'm speaking from the perspective of a developer. And I'm sorry for the people, whose posts I'll use for bad examples of asking questions (Maybe you'll notice what you did wrong and you'll improve it). I also do know that I'm mostly just repeating stuff from the link, that manulaiko posted and some other posts, but it seems like a lot of the repliers didn't read it.
I think we have do differentiate between all kinds of people. Sure we can't do that in a way, that the mindset of all users is exactly represented, but we can try and get roughly to it.
First of all we could look at some factors that make up a “good”, or a “bad” question.
Whether a question is good or bad, and thus likely or unlikely to receive a good answer, depends on a few different things:
1. The correctness of the language the question is written in.
2. The explanation of the problem.
3. The mindset of the person.
As it's not clear what I mean with these parts, I'll explain them a bit.
1.
We all should try our best to ask and answer questions using proper English.
By doing that we don't have problems in understanding each other and “wrong” answers are less likely to be made.
Even if English is not our native language, one should really try to learn it. It's quite important, especially if you're talking to people of different origins (like we are).
2.
Your problem should be properly explained. This involves a decent use of the language (see 1.).
For most questions – especially ones regarding emulators (or big projects at all) – a good explanation is needed.
It just isn't enough to say “Hey, I have a problem. Here's a screen:” (for example:
or
).
The developer(s) of a project need(s) more information on:
- What you want to achieve (This was given in the example)
- What you already tried (Missing in the example)
Now let's assume one wants to help edox77 with his question here. The helping guy may suggest things that edox already tried and thus waste his time. He may think it'll be useless to suggest other things, that edox can try, because he might already tried them, and because of that just stop helping him.
3.
People are very different.
Some want to understand what made the problem happen, so they can then try to fix it. If they are unable to fix it, they'll hope that some user from the community knows how to fix it. Either way they'll try to understand what went wrong, and if a similar problem arises again, they know what to do.
Then there are users who just want to have a ready to use, error free, fast and complete solution for their problem. They don't care what made the problem happen, they don't care how to fix it. Thus, when a similar problem arises again, they will ask a question again. We (as the developers) know this and therefor most of us won't waste our time to make a solution. If you think like these people I would strongly recommend you to start thinking in a different way. The developers are humans. They don't just live to make a usable solution for you. They want to do things, that they enjoy (which most likely is the project you are asking a question about). You just simply can't expect them to help you with everything (at least not for free).
Let's summarize it a bit.
If you ask a question, please try to be helpful and don't expect the helping guy to do everything for you. We are a community. A community doesn't only consist of leechers. What if most of the developers want to move to other projects, because darkorbit bores them, or they're annoyed by this community? Then this community is basically dead.
But if people who struggle, try to improve themselves, then there will always be someone who knows how to fix certain problems, even if the developers are gone.
Even if you are not too good at coding, but you are willing to learn it, I'm sure there will be someone who needs a helping hand for simple programming tasks and is willing to teach some advanced stuff. It's always good to code with others and actually share your work (I do know, that I myself am not sharing too much of my code, but that's because I, personally, find it ugly and I don't want people to think that this is good code. But that will change).
Just don't be selfish, try to ask good questions (so they will be answered) and don't just suspect to get everything, without giving something in return. Keep in mind, that a community lives from it's members.
So that were my thoughts about this section/community. As I already said it's mostly just summarized from other posts for some people, who didn't seem to understand the posts originally, but they seem like they wanted to understand them.
Regards, C0untLizzi.
![[Tutorial] How to ask](https://www.elitepvpers.com/forum/iconimages/darkorbit/tutorial-how-ask_ltr.gif){kind=small}
) what i said.
