I see an unsettling trend... poor initial postings becoming commonplace

[claydoh]

Re: I see an unsettling trend... poor initial postings becoming commonplace

Our search sucks, searching the web can suck. Short, uninformative questions suck. So does that mean those of us who try to help should add to the suck?

I hope not.
There will always be this sort of situation, can't get away from that. And yes, we do get tired of it. Can't escape that either. So how do we handle this?

Have a stock, friendly, informative answer you can paste:

Hi there _________
Welcome to KFN!
Your question unfortunately does not provide enough information for us to help you.

Please make sure you have followed the guidlines found here, here, and here.

We can also use some basic hardware info from your system. You can get this by running Konsole and entering the following command:

lspci

Thanks!

[dibl]

Re: I see an unsettling trend... poor initial postings becoming commonplace

Our search sucks, searching the web can suck. Short, uninformative questions suck. So does that mean those of us who try to help should add to the suck?

I hope not.
There will always be this sort of situation, can't get away from that. And yes, we do get tired of it. Can't escape that either. So how do we handle this?

Have a stock, friendly, informative answer you can paste:

Hi there _________
Welcome to KFN!
Your question unfortunately does not provide enough information for us to help you.

Please make sure you have followed the guidlines found here, here, and here.

We can also use some basic hardware info from your system. You can get this by running Konsole and entering the following command:

lspci

Thanks!

Good one, claydoh -- I think I need to bookmark this one!

[claydoh]

Re: I see an unsettling trend... poor initial postings becoming commonplace

Good one, claydoh -- I think I need to bookmark this one!

I think I will create a Desktop Activity just for KFN and the kubuntu-users mailing lists with a number of sticky notes plasma widgets containing things like this

[MoonRise]

Re: I see an unsettling trend... poor initial postings becoming commonplace

Sounds like an idea!

[Tanner1294]

Re: I see an unsettling trend... poor initial postings becoming commonplace

I completely agree. If anything, the posts like that should be posted in the "New to Linux?" forum as that's where they belong. I'd say that a quick fix to this could be a minimum on the number of letters in a post. Or if the problem become rampant we could add peer-editing style Admin's that review posts before letting them appear in the forums.

The other more settling thing is that those short posts tend to get more help than detailed ones. I've always added as much detail to my posts as possible so people know the situation and can help, but most people seem to ignore them (Lazy much?).