Attack of the high and mighty forum reply (or: can't you just answer a simple question?)

 Careful – major rant!
 
I was having a question from one of clients about something they are dealing with. I know the app, I know the design and the problem was something I didn’t know how to solve (technical problem with caching that seems to have a hotfix somewhere).
So I asked a question on a forum.
 
It always bugs me a bit when people, instead of answering the question, try to “look at the big picture” as if everything would be just dandy and you wouldn’t need to ask them that silly question at all if you’d just listen for a second with your little mind and understand that you are the problem, and there is no solution but to change the way you think.
Well, excuse me, all you high and mighty people who answer questions you weren’t asked.
 
Sometimes, I (Or other people who ask) just want to check out the symptom. I may already *know* about the “bigger” problem that leads to the design issue or whatever the symptom is, but I’m aware of it! No need to spend two paragraphs telling me “Do I need to mention that this is a design poo-poo?” – please! If you need to ask –the answer is an absolute –No!
You do NOT need to mention that, because that’s not why I asked.
 
I can see how that arrogant answer may prove useful in various forums for newbies in various areas, but when the question is about an advanced issue, in an advanced forum, from an experience person, who isn’t really looking for design help, you can assume that they have already asked themselves the same thing, and if they still have a question – you need to assume that this is how they’d need to deal with it for now, so how to you go about solving this – is the answer you need to answer, not anything else.
 
Thank you!
Published Monday, July 10, 2006 1:05 PM by RoyOsherove
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Comments

Monday, July 10, 2006 6:43 AM by Justin-Josef Angel

# re: Attack of the high and mighty forum reply (or: can't you just answer a simple question?)

Links? Quotes? Anything? Generally, it's always good to clarify exactly "What is the problem?" and "Why do you think this is the best solution?". Those two questions really get you into the shoes of the person asking the question so you'd give him the best answer. BTW, Have you tried the Tapuz forums? we've got some smart (ass) people over there that will probably try to answer. Give it a go.
Monday, July 10, 2006 6:51 AM by RoyOsherove

# re: Attack of the high and mighty forum reply (or: can't you just answer a simple question?)

Justin: For "security" reasons, I'm not quoting or pointing to anything.

No need ot offend someone personally.

It's just somethign I needed to write.

Thanks for the pointer to Tapuz!

Roy.

Monday, July 10, 2006 7:36 AM by Ian Griffiths

# re: Attack of the high and mighty forum reply (or: can't you just answer a simple question?)

This suggests to me that you've not spent much time trying to answer questions in forums. In my experience, when someone asks a bizarre-looking and highly specific question, then 99 times out of 100 it's because they're on completely the wrong track. It's a very widely recognized pattern - someone thinks they have half-solved a problem, and just need the other half of the solution, when in fact the most appropriate full solution would not incorporate any of what they've got in their 'half solution'. Often, the only way to distinguish between this 99% case and the 1% of cases where the question is in fact on the right track is to ask for more context. Moreover, failure to supply context seems to be more common amongst newbies than experienced people. So if you're in the 1% where you really do need an answer to a peculiar question, just supply some context up front. That way you instantly distinguish yourself from the newbies, and make it clear that you are in the 1%. So given that the "let's step back and look at the big picture" approach is the correct one 99% of the time, and you've apparently not done anything to identify yourself as being in the other 1%, you shouldn't be surprised at this response. And it's not people being high and mighty. It's simply that if you spend a lot of time helping people in forums, you rapidly learn that the "big picture" approach is the fastest way to help the majority of people. (Indeed, for the 99% where this works best, you'd actively be doing them a disservice if you tried to answer the question literally.) To call it arrogance is your characterization. I think it's a misleading description.
Monday, July 10, 2006 8:29 AM by Ayende Rahien

# re: Attack of the high and mighty forum reply (or: can't you just answer a simple question?)

@Roy, I often enough get questions from smart people that just doesn't make sense without the context in which they are working. To give a simple example, I was asked why they had problems with corruption of cached objects. The issue was mutliply threads touching the same objects which was not thread safe. Gettting there was a long route, since the caching issue itself didn't come until I dug into it (the original question was: "under load, stuff breaks") Also, often enough, the question may be senseless. I was asked (by a senior architect!) to give him a WebMsgBox, with the same properties of the windows one (i.e, the code should stop and wait for reply). I understand the frustration in asking the question and getting more questions in return, but remember that while _you_ have all the context, the one trying to answer the question doesn't. Even with the context, it may not be obvious. Even when the question is reasonable and by a knowledgable guy, you may still need bigger picture stuff. I get a lot of question with Rhino Mocks that turn out to be object identity issues, but I can't figure it out until I see the code that does this.
Monday, July 10, 2006 11:50 AM by Mike Firth

# re: Attack of the high and mighty forum reply (or: can't you just answer a simple question?)

There is a link to the left of this box - VB.NET blogs on MSDN - would be nice if it didn't produce an error.
Monday, July 10, 2006 11:56 AM by Mike Firth

# Error, error, why the error

I am using VB Express with a dial up connection. When I do a help search, I get 3 copies of the error message below - 1 each for MSDN Online., Codezone community, and Questions. Makes it pretty useless. And while I am asking - To get this text, I had to capture a portion of the screen, convert it to a B&W .bmp image and OCR it. None of this highlight and copy. Help About with all those version numbers is the same way. How does Microsoft block highlighting and copying (i.e. no drag and drop)? Search failed The request failed with the error message: Object moved

Object moved to here .

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