What debugging/research should I try before asking for help on the various technical forums?

Question

It's tough to balance doing enough checking vs finally asking the question. Roadblocks appear when we don't ask a timely question, but we all recognize asking repeated frivolous/trivial questions can be annoying. How can we find a happy medium?

Comments

I think there's a bit of a difference between what you should do if you think you've found a bug compared to just want help with a problem. The tag suggests bugs, but the question sounds like solving a programming problem. Which do you want to focus on in this question?

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This question is too vague. It doesn't sound like something anybody would actually ask. Also, it's about asking questions on intfiction.org - which is something that is better asked on that forum itself.

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I don't think this is a bad question as such, but it might be better if it wasn't forum-specific (prob no difference where you ask) and if it was rephrased as something like "what general debugging steps should I take before asking for help."

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Alex, I disagree strongly. Maybe the wording is awkward, but if people get wrapped up in "should I ask/shouldn't I" they don't move on to another problem. And I haven't seen guidelines for that. The thing is, there's a minimum you should do, and there's a maximum you should feel you have to do, and anything between that--definitely, post it and don't get stuck.

I think intfiction.org in parrticular can be intimidating--it's easy to feel 1) you should know this after X years or 2) everyone else knows this, and you don't know where to look.

I have to admit, this was a sideways poke because I'd never really seen a topic like this in intfiction.org in about four years. So, the question: either it needs to be there, or there's a reason it's not there, but I think it's worth exploring.

And yes, it is very sideways. It's a place I feel a lot less comfortable around after Mike Snyder got chased. So this may be off-topic, and it may be a deletable message, but I think it's important for any forum that concentrates on this to have guidelines so people can feel comfortable asking questions.

Juhana...yeah, I agree. That is a much better topic name. So I changed it.

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I think the new title is better, but still think you should clarify the ambiguity!

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Thanks, Dannii. I thought I changed it, but I did not. I tried to clean up the title a bit more, too.

Answer 1

My rule of thumb is to give 3 documentation searches and also to provide 1 or 2 things that didn't work. I also try to cut down the code to something manageable.

Sometimes when I try to hone an example, I find what I was doing wrong, and I don't need to ask a question. That saves everyone a bit of time.

I also try to provide a bridging question e.g. "If I could do X or Y I'd be okay, but I don't see how to. What link am I missing?"

I think discussing these small victories elsewhere is worthwhile, but I don't want to clutter up the help board with them.

Answer 2

It's good to also do a search on the forum or site in question to see if a similar question has been answered before.

The search function on the intfiction.org site isn't the best, but you can put something like the following into a regular search engine to search the site for information about, say, a font in Gargoyle:

site:intfiction.org Gargoyle font

And you'd come up with search results like these: www.google.com/search?q=site:intfiction.org+Gargoyle+font

Comments

linky (show a specific example using a search engine).