Overall, I think I'd say don't sweat it so much.

There are some general tips - use a relevant subject line, be specific, include examples, and so forth. But once you put your question out there, it goes through the filter of an individual. Most of us end up getting good at a very narrow range of solutions - whose jobs give much time to really understand things that your company isn't using? Most of us only learn a few new things at once.

And that's part of the point of why we ask on places like this.

So, the effect is that your question gets filtered through everyone's personal query of "Can I solve this using the tools I have?" And if people can, or sort of can, or can if you squint at the problem set a little, they tend to post. Sometimes, their view into the problem is the one you want (and sometimes not the view you expected to want). More often, someone else's toolset is too far from your own to be useful. That's the nature of a vast collaborative site without the shared context of, say, an engineering department at a given company.

Factually wrong answers are another problem, but hard to solve - people probably aren't trying to be wrong. Hopefully someone else will come along before you fall down a rabbit hole from the misinformation, and both of you will learn something.

-- Kirby, WhitePages.com


In reply to Re: How to ask questions? by kirbyk
in thread How to ask questions? by Eyck

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.