How to ask questions (the right way)
Introduction
So, someone has sent you here; It’s probably for a good reason. It’s likely that you asked a question that is lacking in detail or is entirely redundant.
The thing is, in tech and most of the real world to be honest, asking questions like “I need help, can anyone help me” are usually redundant if you’re talking to someone. The same thing applies to conversations on internet forums. Since internet forums tend to be a permanent place for your question, where others can jump in at any point in time, you really want to give people as much useful information as you can when asking a question.
Let’s say I came up to you on the street and asked, “Hey, can you help me?”, you would have no idea what I’m asking for you to help me with, would you? Whereas if I came up to you and asked, “Hey, do you know where I can get a good cake?”, you would be able to guide me to the nearest bakery without the intermediary question of “I can try, what are you asking?”.
When asking a question online, you’re best off just dumping whatever information you think whoever is helping you might find useful, as this will save both parties from wasted time asking for information you could’ve easily given them.
More times than not, asking a badly worded or information-lacking question will result in it being ignored by those who might be able to help, and sometimes the question you’ve asked is completely irrelevant to what you actually want to know or is focused on a particular group of people even if it’s something someone else could answer, (think asking a question along the lines of “I need help with Java, can someone help me?” when what you really mean is “I am having trouble installing Java on Linux”; the original question implying you’re having trouble with coding in Java rather than a Linux-related problem.)
How-to
So you’ve got a question to ask? Are you trying to solve a problem? Well now, I’m going to help you ask a question that will get you a better chance of actually solving your issue.
When asking for someone to help you, it’s an absolute must that you give any information that you think might be important. It’s much better to add bits of unnecessary information than it is to leave out important information.
If you’re getting an error when doing XYZ, include the error; don’t just say “I’m getting an error with XYZ”; we want to know what that error is, as it’s likely going to be helpful.
If you’re learning Linux, learn the basic troubleshooting tools included. Make dumps of the systemd journal, put them in your post. If the dumps are too big for the platform, them paste them into Termbin or if it’s code, paste it into Github Gists, if it’s a problem with a full project, upload the project to a Github repository. There shouldn’t be anything stopping you from providing the necessary information to help you – leaving it out is only going to make it harder for you, not anyone else.
If you need help with using the mentioned tools, ask the people helping you if they can push you in the right direction.
Don’t expect people to do all the work for you, though. While yes, we do want to help you, the key word is help and not do it all for you.
Give it a think; if you were a mechanic and a customer drove in with their car and asked, “Can you help me?”, what useful information do you see in that question? Sure, they need help, but what with? You’re not a surgeon, so you can’t give them frontal lobe surgery, and you’re not a pilot so you can’t fly them from London to Singapore; they could be asking for directions to a local café, but you don’t know until you respond with a redundant “I can try, but what do you need help with?”; which would easily be avoided if the customer just asked what they need help with initially. If they asked, “Hey, my car is making a strange screeching sound when I brake, can you help me at all?”, then you’d know that they likely have a problem with their car’s brakes. You can then follow up with any questions you might deem useful for you to know. Once you’ve got all the information you need to properly diagnose the issue, you can then go ahead and figure out the user hasn’t changed brake pads in the last 10 years, so they’re worn out and need replacing immediately.
The same theory applies to tech questions.
Examples
Here I am going to give you some examples of bad questions and ways you could improve it. This section uses the syntax of:
Intention: What the OP wants to know.
Bad question: What the OP is currently asking, but can be improved upon.
Good question: What the OP should be asking to get a decent answer and is less likely to be ignored.
Why is it a bad question: A short description on why the original question needs to be improved upon
Intention: The OP is having trouble installing Firefox on Ubuntu 22.04
Bad question: Anyone know anything about VMware?
Good question: I am having trouble with installing Firefox in an Ubuntu 22.04 Linux VM on my ESXi server, I get the following error:
E: Could not open lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend - open (13: Permission denied)
E: Unable to acquire the dpkg frontend lock (/var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend), are you root?
Why is it a bad question: Well, OP’s original question indicated that the original problem was with a VMware product, like vSphere, when in fact that information is somewhat redundant as the problem lies within Ubuntu instead. In the updated question, we now know that the issue is related to the user not running the command as root/sudo and/or the account isn’t a superuser. While it’s not necessarily important here, as this is an error that has been in apt since its creation, including the version of Ubuntu in the question may be helpful if the error was version-specific.
Please read this post on how to easily troubleshoot errors by weeding out the useful information.
Intention: The OP would like to know where to start their journey in Cybersecurity
Bad question: Can anyone help me?
Good question: Hey, I’m considering going into a cybersecurity career, I don’t know where to start, can someone give me guidance on where I should begin?
Why is it a bad question: The OP doesn’t give any information in the initial question, they’re just asking if anyone can help. When on internet forums, you can usually safely assume that someone does indeed know the answer to your question and even if they don’t, there’s often someone who will do a bit of research to assist you. On a separate note: try to ask in the nicest way possible, as people will be more inclined to take time out of their day to help you. Put simply, if you’re a cunt to them, they won’t want to help.
Summary
In short, if you want someone to help you out, then you’re going to have to give them the information they need to help you.
If you’re nice to them, they’ll be more likely to spend the time helping you.
We’re all volunteers here, we don’t get paid to help you, we do it because we enjoy helping people out, and sometimes it even helps with our own knowledge.
We work in tech because we find it interesting and want to expand our own knowledge, so why not help others with expanding their own?
On another note, even if you don’t think you have enough knowledge to help out, even spending 10 minutes to research someone’s issue and reporting back with your findings can be helpful to them.
Try not to be snarky if you find something on Google that they haven’t, share it with them and often times they’ll be thankful; just saying “I found it on Google, look it up”, often times they will have already looked it up. Send them the search terms you used to find a potential answer or link to the page they’re looking for.