Tips For Success In Forums

Chapter 8 Mexican Conn Tips For Success In Forums

This article is long, but you’ll likely pick up some good guidance on how to use a discussion forum.
The Chapter 8 forums section is intended to help members share information and ask questions of others. The volunteers and members of Chapter 8 are pretty friendly and helpful people who will lend help when asked. But, before you start firing off an RV load of questions please consider the following of tips below.
    1. Try to find an answer to your forum questions by first searching the history or archives of the forum or topic area.
    2. If the question is very narrow in focus such as “What is the replacement part number for that RV generator doohickey in a 2018 Navion with 4-wheel drive with round tail lights?” try to find an answer by searching the Web using a variety of sources such as the manufacturer’s website or an RV club specializing in the brand and model of interest.
    3. Try to find an answer by reading the FAQ on this website especially if it has to do with an upcoming rally or tour. Every Rally year has its own updated FAQ and many pages with details of importance for participants. We have one, for example, for 2025 that will be released when the rally/tour is formally announced in mid-June.
    4. Try to find an answer by DIY inspection or experimentation. Sometimes it just takes some curiosity to find the root cause of a problem and the appropriate answer will hopefully spring forth from your inquisitive questioning.
    5. Try to find an answer by asking a friend with knowledge or experience in the topic area. None of us know everything about the RV lifestyle, travel destinations, and all the associated technology (as much as we’d like to believe), but some people are fountains of esoteric information. Keep these experts close and the pseudo KIAs further away.
    When you ask your question, display the fact that you have already taken some initial steps to understand the issue; this will help establish that you’re not being a lazy sponge and wasting people’s time. Better yet, display what you have learned from doing these things. We like answering questions for people who have demonstrated they can learn from the answers. NO excuses…
    Use tactics like doing a Google search on the text of whatever error message you get (searching Google groups as well as Web pages). This might well take you straight to a fix document. Even if it doesn’t, saying “I googled the following phrase but didn’t get anything that looked promising” is a good thing to do in e-mail or news postings requesting help, if only because it records what searches won’t help. It will also help to direct other people with similar problems to your thread by linking the search terms to what will hopefully be your problem and resolution thread.
    Take your time. Do not expect to be able to solve a complicated problem with a few seconds of Googling. Read and understand the FAQs, sit back, relax, and give the problem some thought before approaching experts. Trust us, they will be able to tell from your questions how much reading and thinking you did, and will be more willing to help if you come prepared. Don’t instantly fire your whole arsenal of questions just because your first search turned up no answers (or too many).
    Prepare your question. Think it through. Hasty-sounding questions get hasty answers, or none at all. The more you do to demonstrate that having put thought and effort into solving your problem before seeking help, the more likely you are to get help.
    Beware of asking the wrong question. Never assume you are entitled to an answer. You are not; you aren’t, after all, paying for the service. If you earn it, you will earn an answer by asking a substantial, interesting, and thought-provoking question — one that implicitly contributes to the community experience rather than merely passively demanding knowledge from others.
    On the other hand, making it clear that you are able and willing to help in developing the solution is a perfect start. “Would someone provide a pointer?”, “What is my example missing?”, and “What site should I have checked?” are more likely to get answered than “Please post the exact procedure I should use.” because you’re making it clear that you’re truly willing to complete the process if someone can just point you in the right direction.

    When You Ask

    Choose your forum carefully. Be sensitive in choosing where you ask your question. You are likely to be ignored, or written off as a loser if you:
      • Please post your question to a forum where it’s off-topic
      • Post a very elementary question to a forum where advanced technical questions are expected, or vice-versa
      • Cross-post to too many different newsgroups
      • Post a personal e-mail to somebody who is neither an acquaintance of yours nor personally responsible for solving your problem
      The first step, therefore, is to find the right forum. Again, Google and other Web-searching methods are your friend. Use them to find the project webpage most closely associated with the hardware or software giving you difficulties. Usually, it will have links to a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) list, and to project mailing lists and their archives. These mailing lists are the final places to go for help if your efforts (including reading those FAQs you found) do not find you a solution.
      Shooting off an e-mail to a person or forum that you are not familiar with is risky at best. For example, do not assume that the author of an informative webpage wants to be your free consultant. Do not make optimistic guesses about whether your question will be welcome — if you’re unsure, send it elsewhere, or refrain from sending it at all.
      When selecting a Web forum, newsgroup, or mailing list, don’t trust the name by itself too far; look for a FAQ or charter to verify your question is on-topic. Read some of the back traffic before posting so you’ll get a feel for how things are done there. It’s a very good idea to do a keyword search for words relating to your problem on the newsgroup or mailing list archives before you post. It may find you an answer, and if not it will help you formulate a better question.
      Don’t shootgun-blast all the available help topics at once, that’s like yelling and irritating people. Step through them softly.
      Know what your topic is! One of the classic mistakes is asking questions about RV suspensions in a forum devoted to selecting RV destinations.
      Wrong Subject Content
      The subject header is your golden opportunity to attract qualified experts’ attention in around 50 characters or fewer. Don’t waste it on babble like “Please help me” (let alone “PLEASE HELP ME!!!!”; messages with subjects like that get discarded by reflex). Don’t try to impress us with the depth of your anguish; use the space for a super-concise problem description instead.
      One good convention for subject headers, used by many tech support organizations, is “object – deviation”. The “object” part specifies what thing or group of things is having a problem, and the “deviation” part describes the deviation from expected behavior.
      If you ask a question in a reply, be sure to change the subject line to indicate that you’re asking a question. A Subject line that looks like “Re: test” or “Re: different issue” is less likely to attract useful attention. Also, pare quotations of previous messages to the minimum consistent with cluing in new readers.
      Do not simply hit reply to a list message to start an entirely new thread. This will limit your audience.
      Changing the subject is not sufficient. Instead, start an entirely new e-mail or forum thread.

      Make it easy to reply

      Finishing your query with “Please send your reply to… ” makes it quite unlikely you will get an answer. If you can’t take even the few seconds required to set up a correct Reply-To header in your mail agent, we can’t be bothered to take even a few seconds to think about your problem. 
      In Chapter 8 forums, asking for a reply by e-mail is outright rude, unless you believe the information may be sensitive (and somebody will, for some unknown reason, let not only you but not the whole forum know it). If you want an e-mail copy when somebody replies in the thread, request that the Web forum send it; this feature is supported almost everywhere under options like “subscribe”, “watch this thread”, “send e-mail on answers”, etc.
      Write in clear, grammatical, correctly-spelled language
      Experience has shown that careless and sloppy writers are usually also careless and sloppy at thinking and coding (often enough to bet on, anyway). Answering questions from careless and sloppy thinkers is not rewarding; we’d rather spend our time elsewhere.
      So expressing your question clearly and well is important. If you can’t be bothered to do that, we can’t pay attention. Spend the extra effort to polish your language. It doesn’t have to be stiff or formal — in fact, forum culture values informal, slangy, and humorous language used with precision. But it has to be precise; there has to be some indication that you’re thinking and paying attention.
      Spell, punctuate, and capitalize correctly. Don’t confuse “its” with “it’s”, “loose” with “lose”, or “discrete” with “discreet”. Don’t TYPE IN ALL CAPS; this is read as shouting and considered rude. (All-small letter is only slightly less annoying, as it’s difficult to read.
      More generally, if you write like a semi-literate noob you will very likely be ignored. So don’t use instant messaging shortcuts. Spelling “you” as “u” makes you look like a semi-literate boob to save two entire keystrokes. Worse: writing like a l33t script kiddie hax0r is the absolute kiss of death and guarantees you will receive nothing but stony silence (or, at best, a heaping helping of scorn and sarcasm) in return.
      Send questions in accessible, standard formats
        • If you’re sending e-mail from a Windows machine, turn off Microsoft’s problematic “Smart Quotes” feature (From Tools > AutoCorrect Options, clear the smart quotes checkbox under AutoFormat As You Type.). This is so you’ll avoid sprinkling garbage characters through your mail.
        • In Web forums, do not abuse “smiley” and “HTML” features (when they are present). A smiley or two is usually OK, but colored fancy text tends to make people think you are not serious. 
      When asking your question, it is best to write as though you assume you are doing something wrong,
      Groveling is not a substitute for doing your homework
      Some people who get that they shouldn’t behave rudely or arrogantly, demanding an answer, retreat to the opposite extreme of groveling. “I know I’m just a pathetic newbie loser, but…”.  This is distracting and unhelpful. It’s especially annoying when it’s coupled with vagueness about the actual problem.
      Don’t waste your time, or ours, on crude primate politics. Instead, present the background facts and your question as clearly as you can. That is a better way to position yourself than by groveling.
      Describe the problem’s symptoms, not your guesses
      Describe your problem’s symptoms in chronological order.
      Describe the goal, not the step
      Forum users participate because they believe solving problems should be a public, transparent process during which a first try at an answer can and should be corrected if someone more knowledgeable notices that it is incomplete or incorrect. Also, helpers get some of their reward for being respondents from being seen as competent and knowledgeable by their peers.
      When you ask for a private reply, you are disrupting both the process and the reward. Don’t do this. It’s the respondent’s choice whether to reply privately — and if he or she does, it’s usually because he or she thinks the question is too ill-formed or obvious to be interesting to others.
      There is one limited exception to this rule. If you think the question is such that you are likely to get many answers that are all closely similar, then the magic words are “e-mail me and I’ll summarize the answers for the group”. It is courteous to try and save the mailing list or newsgroup from a flood of substantially identical postings — but you have to keep the promise to summarize.
      Be explicit about your question
      Open-ended questions tend to be perceived as open-ended time sinks. Those people most likely to be able to give you a useful answer are also the busiest people (if only because they take on the most work themselves). People like that are allergic to open-ended time sinks, thus they tend to be allergic to open-ended questions.
      You are more likely to get a useful response if you are explicit about what you want respondents to do. This will focus their effort and implicitly put an upper bound on the time and energy a respondent must allocate to helping you. This is good.
      To understand the world the experts live in, think of expertise as an abundant resource and time to respond as a scarce one. The less of a time commitment you implicitly ask for, the more likely you are to get an answer from someone really good and busy.
      So it is useful to frame your question to minimize the time commitment required for an expert to field it — but this is often not the same thing as simplifying the question. Thus, for example, “Would you give me a pointer to a good explanation of X?” is usually a smarter question than “Would you explain X, please?”
      Prune pointless queries
      Resist the temptation to close your request for help with semantically null questions like “Can anyone help me?” or “Is there an answer?” First: if you’ve written your problem description halfway competently, such tacked-on questions are at best superfluous. Second: because they are superfluous, people find them annoying — and are likely to return logically impeccable but dismissive answers like “Yes, you can be helped” and “No, there is no help for you.”
      In general, asking yes-or-no questions is a good thing to avoid unless you want a yes-or-no answer,
      Don’t flag your question as “Urgent”, even if it is for you
      One possible exception is you are off-road 40 miles, and your RV is balanced adjacent to a cliff while the thunderstorm is washing away your tire traction. That’s your problem, not ours, and we probably can’t be of any help except to call Search and Rescue. Claiming urgency is very likely to be counter-productive: most people will simply delete such messages as rude and selfish attempts to elicit immediate and special attention. Furthermore, the word ‘Urgent’ (and other similar attempts to grab attention in the subject line) often triggers spam filters – your intended recipients might never see it at all.  Remember the adage: “Your failure to plan does not constitute an emergency for me!
      If you find this mysterious, re-read the rest of this how-to repeatedly until you understand it before posting anything at all.
      Courtesy never hurts, and sometimes helps
      Use “Please” and “Thanks for your attention” or “Thanks for your consideration”. Make it clear you appreciate the time people spend helping you for free.
      Follow up with a brief note on the solution
      Send a note after the problem has been solved to all who helped you; let them know how it came out and thank them again for their help. If the problem attracts general interest in a mailing list or newsgroup, it’s appropriate to post the follow-up there.
      Optimally, the reply should be to the thread started by the original question posting and should have ‘FIXED’, ‘RESOLVED’, or an equally obvious tag in the subject line. On mailing lists with fast turnaround, a potential respondent who sees a thread about “Problem X” ending with “Problem X – FIXED” knows not to waste his/her time even reading the thread (unless (s)he finds Problem X interesting) and can therefore use that time solving a different problem.
      Your follow-up doesn’t have to be long and involved; a simple “Howdy — it was a frayed chassis wire Thanks, everyone. – Bob” would be better than nothing. A short and sweet summary is better than a long dissertation unless the solution has real technical depth. Say what action solved the problem, but you need not replay the whole troubleshooting sequence.
      For problems with some depth, it is appropriate to post a summary of the troubleshooting history. Describe your final problem statement. Describe what worked as a solution, and indicate avoidable blind alleys after that. The blind alleys should come after the correct solution and other summary material, rather than turning the follow-up into a detective story. Name the names of people who helped you; you’ll make friends that way.
      Consider how you might be able to prevent others from having the same problem in the future. Ask yourself if a documentation or FAQ revision would help, and if the answer is yes send that revision to the FAQ maintainer.
      This sort of good follow-up behavior is more important than conventional politeness. It’s how you get a reputation for playing well with others, which can be a very valuable asset.

      How To Interpret Answers

      RTFM and STFW: How To Tell You’ve Seriously Screwed Up
      There is an ancient and hallowed tradition: if you get a reply that reads “RTFM”, the person who sent it thinks you should have Read The F**king Manual. He or she is almost certainly right. Go read it.
      RTFM has a younger relative called “STFW”. The person who sent it thinks you should have Searched The F**king Web. He or she is almost certainly right. Go search it. (The milder version of this is when you are told “Google is your friend!”)
      In most Web forums, you may also be told to search the forum archives. Someone may even be so kind as to provide a pointer to the previous thread where this problem was solved. But do not rely on this consideration; do your archive-searching before asking.
      Often, the person telling you to search has the manual or the web page with the information you need open and is looking at it as he or she types. These replies mean that the responder thinks (a) the information you need is easy to find, and (b) you will learn more if you seek out the information than if you have it spoon-fed to you.
      You shouldn’t be offended by this; your respondent is showing you a rough kind of respect simply by not ignoring you. You should instead be thankful for this grandmotherly kindness.
      If you don’t understand…
      If you don’t understand the answer, do not immediately bounce back a demand for clarification. Use the same tools that you used to try and answer your original question (manuals, FAQs, the Web, skilled friends) to understand the answer. Then, if you still need to ask for clarification, exhibit what you have learned.
      Dealing with rudeness
      Much of what looks like rudeness is not intended to give offense. Rather, it’s the product of the direct, cut-through-the-BS communications style that is natural to people who are more concerned about solving problems than making others feel warm and fuzzy.
      When you perceive rudeness, try to react calmly. If someone is acting out, it is very likely a well-known person in the forum will call him or her on it. If that doesn’t happen and you lose your temper, the person you lose it at was likely behaving within the community’s norms and you will be considered at fault. This will hurt your chances of getting the information or help you want.
      On the other hand, you will occasionally run across rudeness and posturing that is quite gratuitous. The flip side of the above is that it is acceptable form to slam real offenders quite hard, dissecting their misbehavior with a sharp verbal scalpel. Be very, very sure of your ground before you try this, however. The line between correcting an incivility and starting a pointless flamewar is thin enough that people not infrequently blunder across it; if you are a newbie or an outsider, your chances of avoiding such a blunder are low. If you’re after information rather than entertainment, it’s better to keep your fingers off the keyboard than to risk this.
      In the next section, we’ll talk about a different issue; the kind of “rudeness” you’ll see when you misbehave.
      On Not Reacting Like A Loser
      Odds are you’ll screw up a few times in community forums. And you’ll be told exactly how you screwed up, possibly with colorful asides. In public.
      When this happens, the worst thing you can do is whine about the experience, claim to have been verbally assaulted, demand apologies, scream, hold your breath, threaten lawsuits, complain to people’s employers, leave the toilet seat up, etc. Instead, here’s what you do:
      Get over it. It’s normal. It’s healthy and appropriate.
      Community standards do not maintain themselves: They’re maintained by people actively applying them, visibly, in public. Don’t whine that all criticism should have been conveyed via private e-mail: That’s not how it works. Nor is it useful to insist you’ve been personally insulted when someone comments that one of your claims was wrong, or that his views differ. Those are loser attitudes.
      Exaggeratedly “friendly” (in that fashion) or useful: Pick one.
      Remember: When someone tells you that you’ve screwed up, and (no matter how gruffly) tells you not to do it again, he’s acting out of concern for (1) you and (2) his/her community. It would be much easier to ignore you and filter you out of his/her life. If you can’t manage to be grateful, at least have a little dignity, don’t whine, and don’t expect to be treated like a fragile doll just because you’re a newcomer with a theatrically hypersensitive soul and delusions of entitlement.
      Sometimes people will attack you personally, flame without an apparent reason, etc., even if you don’t screw up (or have only screwed up in their imagination). In this case, complaining is the way to screw up.
      These flamers are either “lamers” who don’t have a clue but believe themselves to be experts or would-be psychologists testing whether you’ll screw up. The other readers either ignore them or find ways to deal with them on their own. The flamers’ behavior creates problems for themselves, which don’t have to concern you.
      Don’t let yourself be drawn into a flame war, either. Most flames are best ignored — after you’ve checked whether they are flames, not pointers to how you have screwed up, and not cleverly ciphered answers to your real question (this happens as well).
      If You Can’t Get An Answer
      If you can’t get an answer, please don’t take it personally that we don’t feel we can help you. Sometimes the members of the asked group may simply not know the answer. No response is not the same as being ignored, though admittedly it’s hard to spot the difference from outside.
      In general, simply re-posting your question is a bad idea. This will be seen as pointlessly annoying. Have patience: the person with your answer may be in a different time zone and asleep. Or it may be that your question wasn’t well-formed, to begin with.
      There are other sources of help you can go to, often sources better adapted to a novice’s needs.
      That said Chapter 8 wants you to share your questions and answers in the provided forums.  This page of extensive tips is not intended to discourage you from participating, Rather, we want everyone to build a reliable, trustworthy, open, and friendly community of RVers with both knowledge and heart. We are all in this together. 
      How To Answer Questions in a Helpful Way
      Be gentle. Problem-related stress can make people seem rude or stupid even when they’re not.
      Reply to a first offender offline. There is no need for public humiliation for someone who may have made an honest mistake. A real newbie may not know how to search archives or where the FAQ is stored or posted.
      If you don’t know for sure, say so! A wrong but authoritative-sounding answer is worse than none at all. Don’t point anyone down the wrong path simply because it’s fun to sound like an expert. Be humble and honest; set a good example for both the querent and your peers.
      If you can’t help, don’t hinder. Don’t make jokes about procedures that could trash the user’s setup — the poor sap might interpret these as instructions.
      Ask probing questions to elicit more details. If you’re good at this, the querent will learn something — and so might you. Try to turn the bad question into a good one; remember we were all RV newbies once.

      This article is long, but you’ll likely pick up some good guidance on how to use a discussion forum.
      The Chapter 8 forums section is intended to help members share information and ask questions of others. The volunteers and members of Chapter 8 are pretty friendly and helpful people who will lend help when asked. But, before you start firing off an RV load of questions please consider the following of tips below.
      1. Try to find an answer to your forum questions by first searching the history or archives of the forum or topic area.
      2. If the question is very narrow in focus such as “What is the replacement part number for that RV generator doohickey in a 2018 Navion with 4-wheel drive with round tail lights?” try to find an answer by searching the Web using a variety of sources such as the manufacturer’s website or an RV club specializing in the brand and model of interest.
      3. Try to find an answer by reading the FAQ on this website especially if it has to do with an upcoming rally or tour. Every Rally year has its own updated FAQ and many pages with details of importance for participants. We have one, for example, for 2025 that will be released when the rally/tour is formally announced in mid-June.
      4. Try to find an answer by DIY inspection or experimentation. Sometimes it just takes some curiosity to find the root cause of a problem and the appropriate answer will hopefully spring forth from your inquisitive questioning.
      5. Try to find an answer by asking a friend with knowledge or experience in the topic area. None of us know everything about the RV lifestyle, travel destinations, and all the associated technology (as much as we’d like to believe), but some people are fountains of esoteric information. Keep these experts close and the pseudo KIAs further away.
      When you ask your question, display the fact that you have already taken some initial steps to understand the issue; this will help establish that you’re not being a lazy sponge and wasting people’s time. Better yet, display what you have learned from doing these things. We like answering questions for people who have demonstrated they can learn from the answers. NO excuses…
      Use tactics like doing a Google search on the text of whatever error message you get (searching Google groups as well as Web pages). This might well take you straight to a fix document. Even if it doesn’t, saying “I googled the following phrase but didn’t get anything that looked promising” is a good thing to do in e-mail or news postings requesting help, if only because it records what searches won’t help. It will also help to direct other people with similar problems to your thread by linking the search terms to what will hopefully be your problem and resolution thread.
      Take your time. Do not expect to be able to solve a complicated problem with a few seconds of Googling. Read and understand the FAQs, sit back, relax, and give the problem some thought before approaching experts. Trust us, they will be able to tell from your questions how much reading and thinking you did, and will be more willing to help if you come prepared. Don’t instantly fire your whole arsenal of questions just because your first search turned up no answers (or too many).
      Prepare your question. Think it through. Hasty-sounding questions get hasty answers, or none at all. The more you do to demonstrate that having put thought and effort into solving your problem before seeking help, the more likely you are to get help.
      Beware of asking the wrong question. Never assume you are entitled to an answer. You are not; you aren’t, after all, paying for the service. If you earn it, you will earn an answer by asking a substantial, interesting, and thought-provoking question — one that implicitly contributes to the community experience rather than merely passively demanding knowledge from others.
      On the other hand, making it clear that you are able and willing to help in developing the solution is a perfect start. “Would someone provide a pointer?”, “What is my example missing?”, and “What site should I have checked?” are more likely to get answered than “Please post the exact procedure I should use.” because you’re making it clear that you’re truly willing to complete the process if someone can just point you in the right direction.

      When You Ask

      Choose your forum carefully. Be sensitive in choosing where you ask your question. You are likely to be ignored, or written off as a loser if you:
      • Please post your question to a forum where it’s off-topic
      • Post a very elementary question to a forum where advanced technical questions are expected, or vice-versa
      • Cross-post to too many different newsgroups
      • Post a personal e-mail to somebody who is neither an acquaintance of yours nor personally responsible for solving your problem
      The first step, therefore, is to find the right forum. Again, Google and other Web-searching methods are your friend. Use them to find the project webpage most closely associated with the hardware or software giving you difficulties. Usually, it will have links to a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) list, and to project mailing lists and their archives. These mailing lists are the final places to go for help if your efforts (including reading those FAQs you found) do not find you a solution.
      Shooting off an e-mail to a person or forum that you are not familiar with is risky at best. For example, do not assume that the author of an informative webpage wants to be your free consultant. Do not make optimistic guesses about whether your question will be welcome — if you’re unsure, send it elsewhere, or refrain from sending it at all.
      When selecting a Web forum, newsgroup, or mailing list, don’t trust the name by itself too far; look for a FAQ or charter to verify your question is on-topic. Read some of the back traffic before posting so you’ll get a feel for how things are done there. It’s a very good idea to do a keyword search for words relating to your problem on the newsgroup or mailing list archives before you post. It may find you an answer, and if not it will help you formulate a better question.
      Don’t shootgun-blast all the available help topics at once, that’s like yelling and irritating people. Step through them softly.
      Know what your topic is! One of the classic mistakes is asking questions about RV suspensions in a forum devoted to selecting RV destinations.
      Wrong Subject Content
      The subject header is your golden opportunity to attract qualified experts’ attention in around 50 characters or fewer. Don’t waste it on babble like “Please help me” (let alone “PLEASE HELP ME!!!!”; messages with subjects like that get discarded by reflex). Don’t try to impress us with the depth of your anguish; use the space for a super-concise problem description instead.
      One good convention for subject headers, used by many tech support organizations, is “object – deviation”. The “object” part specifies what thing or group of things is having a problem, and the “deviation” part describes the deviation from expected behavior.
      If you ask a question in a reply, be sure to change the subject line to indicate that you’re asking a question. A Subject line that looks like “Re: test” or “Re: different issue” is less likely to attract useful attention. Also, pare quotations of previous messages to the minimum consistent with cluing in new readers.
      Do not simply hit reply to a list message to start an entirely new thread. This will limit your audience.
      Changing the subject is not sufficient. Instead, start an entirely new e-mail or forum thread.

      Make it easy to reply

      Finishing your query with “Please send your reply to… ” makes it quite unlikely you will get an answer. If you can’t take even the few seconds required to set up a correct Reply-To header in your mail agent, we can’t be bothered to take even a few seconds to think about your problem. 
      In Chapter 8 forums, asking for a reply by e-mail is outright rude, unless you believe the information may be sensitive (and somebody will, for some unknown reason, let not only you but not the whole forum know it). If you want an e-mail copy when somebody replies in the thread, request that the Web forum send it; this feature is supported almost everywhere under options like “subscribe”, “watch this thread”, “send e-mail on answers”, etc.
      Write in clear, grammatical, correctly-spelled language
      Experience has shown that careless and sloppy writers are usually also careless and sloppy at thinking and coding (often enough to bet on, anyway). Answering questions from careless and sloppy thinkers is not rewarding; we’d rather spend our time elsewhere.
      So expressing your question clearly and well is important. If you can’t be bothered to do that, we can’t pay attention. Spend the extra effort to polish your language. It doesn’t have to be stiff or formal — in fact, forum culture values informal, slangy, and humorous language used with precision. But it has to be precise; there has to be some indication that you’re thinking and paying attention.
      Spell, punctuate, and capitalize correctly. Don’t confuse “its” with “it’s”, “loose” with “lose”, or “discrete” with “discreet”. Don’t TYPE IN ALL CAPS; this is read as shouting and considered rude. (All-small letter is only slightly less annoying, as it’s difficult to read.
      More generally, if you write like a semi-literate noob you will very likely be ignored. So don’t use instant messaging shortcuts. Spelling “you” as “u” makes you look like a semi-literate boob to save two entire keystrokes. Worse: writing like a l33t script kiddie hax0r is the absolute kiss of death and guarantees you will receive nothing but stony silence (or, at best, a heaping helping of scorn and sarcasm) in return.
      Send questions in accessible, standard formats
        • If you’re sending e-mail from a Windows machine, turn off Microsoft’s problematic “Smart Quotes” feature (From Tools > AutoCorrect Options, clear the smart quotes checkbox under AutoFormat As You Type.). This is so you’ll avoid sprinkling garbage characters through your mail.
        • In Web forums, do not abuse “smiley” and “HTML” features (when they are present). A smiley or two is usually OK, but colored fancy text tends to make people think you are not serious. 
      When asking your question, it is best to write as though you assume you are doing something wrong,
      Groveling is not a substitute for doing your homework
      Some people who get that they shouldn’t behave rudely or arrogantly, demanding an answer, retreat to the opposite extreme of groveling. “I know I’m just a pathetic newbie loser, but…”.  This is distracting and unhelpful. It’s especially annoying when it’s coupled with vagueness about the actual problem.
      Don’t waste your time, or ours, on crude primate politics. Instead, present the background facts and your question as clearly as you can. That is a better way to position yourself than by groveling.
      Describe the problem’s symptoms, not your guesses
      Describe your problem’s symptoms in chronological order.
      Describe the goal, not the step
      Forum users participate because they believe solving problems should be a public, transparent process during which a first try at an answer can and should be corrected if someone more knowledgeable notices that it is incomplete or incorrect. Also, helpers get some of their reward for being respondents from being seen as competent and knowledgeable by their peers.
      When you ask for a private reply, you are disrupting both the process and the reward. Don’t do this. It’s the respondent’s choice whether to reply privately — and if he or she does, it’s usually because he or she thinks the question is too ill-formed or obvious to be interesting to others.
      There is one limited exception to this rule. If you think the question is such that you are likely to get many answers that are all closely similar, then the magic words are “e-mail me and I’ll summarize the answers for the group”. It is courteous to try and save the mailing list or newsgroup from a flood of substantially identical postings — but you have to keep the promise to summarize.
      Be explicit about your question
      Open-ended questions tend to be perceived as open-ended time sinks. Those people most likely to be able to give you a useful answer are also the busiest people (if only because they take on the most work themselves). People like that are allergic to open-ended time sinks, thus they tend to be allergic to open-ended questions.
      You are more likely to get a useful response if you are explicit about what you want respondents to do. This will focus their effort and implicitly put an upper bound on the time and energy a respondent must allocate to helping you. This is good.
      To understand the world the experts live in, think of expertise as an abundant resource and time to respond as a scarce one. The less of a time commitment you implicitly ask for, the more likely you are to get an answer from someone really good and busy.
      So it is useful to frame your question to minimize the time commitment required for an expert to field it — but this is often not the same thing as simplifying the question. Thus, for example, “Would you give me a pointer to a good explanation of X?” is usually a smarter question than “Would you explain X, please?”
      Prune pointless queries
      Resist the temptation to close your request for help with semantically null questions like “Can anyone help me?” or “Is there an answer?” First: if you’ve written your problem description halfway competently, such tacked-on questions are at best superfluous. Second: because they are superfluous, people find them annoying — and are likely to return logically impeccable but dismissive answers like “Yes, you can be helped” and “No, there is no help for you.”
      In general, asking yes-or-no questions is a good thing to avoid unless you want a yes-or-no answer,
      Don’t flag your question as “Urgent”, even if it is for you
      One possible exception is you are off-road 40 miles, and your RV is balanced adjacent to a cliff while the thunderstorm is washing away your tire traction. That’s your problem, not ours, and we probably can’t be of any help except to call Search and Rescue. Claiming urgency is very likely to be counter-productive: most people will simply delete such messages as rude and selfish attempts to elicit immediate and special attention. Furthermore, the word ‘Urgent’ (and other similar attempts to grab attention in the subject line) often triggers spam filters – your intended recipients might never see it at all.  Remember the adage: “Your failure to plan does not constitute an emergency for me!
      If you find this mysterious, re-read the rest of this how-to repeatedly until you understand it before posting anything at all.
      Courtesy never hurts, and sometimes helps
      Use “Please” and “Thanks for your attention” or “Thanks for your consideration”. Make it clear you appreciate the time people spend helping you for free.
      Follow up with a brief note on the solution
      Send a note after the problem has been solved to all who helped you; let them know how it came out and thank them again for their help. If the problem attracts general interest in a mailing list or newsgroup, it’s appropriate to post the follow-up there.
      Optimally, the reply should be to the thread started by the original question posting and should have ‘FIXED’, ‘RESOLVED’, or an equally obvious tag in the subject line. On mailing lists with fast turnaround, a potential respondent who sees a thread about “Problem X” ending with “Problem X – FIXED” knows not to waste his/her time even reading the thread (unless (s)he finds Problem X interesting) and can therefore use that time solving a different problem.
      Your follow-up doesn’t have to be long and involved; a simple “Howdy — it was a frayed chassis wire Thanks, everyone. – Bob” would be better than nothing. A short and sweet summary is better than a long dissertation unless the solution has real technical depth. Say what action solved the problem, but you need not replay the whole troubleshooting sequence.
      For problems with some depth, it is appropriate to post a summary of the troubleshooting history. Describe your final problem statement. Describe what worked as a solution, and indicate avoidable blind alleys after that. The blind alleys should come after the correct solution and other summary material, rather than turning the follow-up into a detective story. Name the names of people who helped you; you’ll make friends that way.
      Consider how you might be able to prevent others from having the same problem in the future. Ask yourself if a documentation or FAQ revision would help, and if the answer is yes send that revision to the FAQ maintainer.
      This sort of good follow-up behavior is more important than conventional politeness. It’s how you get a reputation for playing well with others, which can be a very valuable asset.

      How To Interpret Answers

      RTFM and STFW: How To Tell You’ve Seriously Screwed Up
      There is an ancient and hallowed tradition: if you get a reply that reads “RTFM”, the person who sent it thinks you should have Read The F**king Manual. He or she is almost certainly right. Go read it.
      RTFM has a younger relative called “STFW”. The person who sent it thinks you should have Searched The F**king Web. He or she is almost certainly right. Go search it. (The milder version of this is when you are told “Google is your friend!”)
      In most Web forums, you may also be told to search the forum archives. Someone may even be so kind as to provide a pointer to the previous thread where this problem was solved. But do not rely on this consideration; do your archive-searching before asking.
      Often, the person telling you to search has the manual or the web page with the information you need open and is looking at it as he or she types. These replies mean that the responder thinks (a) the information you need is easy to find, and (b) you will learn more if you seek out the information than if you have it spoon-fed to you.
      You shouldn’t be offended by this; your respondent is showing you a rough kind of respect simply by not ignoring you. You should instead be thankful for this grandmotherly kindness.
      If you don’t understand…
      If you don’t understand the answer, do not immediately bounce back a demand for clarification. Use the same tools that you used to try and answer your original question (manuals, FAQs, the Web, skilled friends) to understand the answer. Then, if you still need to ask for clarification, exhibit what you have learned.
      Dealing with rudeness
      Much of what looks like rudeness is not intended to give offense. Rather, it’s the product of the direct, cut-through-the-BS communications style that is natural to people who are more concerned about solving problems than making others feel warm and fuzzy.
      When you perceive rudeness, try to react calmly. If someone is acting out, it is very likely a well-known person in the forum will call him or her on it. If that doesn’t happen and you lose your temper, the person you lose it at was likely behaving within the community’s norms and you will be considered at fault. This will hurt your chances of getting the information or help you want.
      On the other hand, you will occasionally run across rudeness and posturing that is quite gratuitous. The flip side of the above is that it is acceptable form to slam real offenders quite hard, dissecting their misbehavior with a sharp verbal scalpel. Be very, very sure of your ground before you try this, however. The line between correcting an incivility and starting a pointless flamewar is thin enough that people not infrequently blunder across it; if you are a newbie or an outsider, your chances of avoiding such a blunder are low. If you’re after information rather than entertainment, it’s better to keep your fingers off the keyboard than to risk this.
      In the next section, we’ll talk about a different issue; the kind of “rudeness” you’ll see when you misbehave.
      On Not Reacting Like A Loser
      Odds are you’ll screw up a few times in community forums. And you’ll be told exactly how you screwed up, possibly with colorful asides. In public.
      When this happens, the worst thing you can do is whine about the experience, claim to have been verbally assaulted, demand apologies, scream, hold your breath, threaten lawsuits, complain to people’s employers, leave the toilet seat up, etc. Instead, here’s what you do:
      Get over it. It’s normal. It’s healthy and appropriate.
      Community standards do not maintain themselves: They’re maintained by people actively applying them, visibly, in public. Don’t whine that all criticism should have been conveyed via private e-mail: That’s not how it works. Nor is it useful to insist you’ve been personally insulted when someone comments that one of your claims was wrong, or that his views differ. Those are loser attitudes.
      Exaggeratedly “friendly” (in that fashion) or useful: Pick one.
      Remember: When someone tells you that you’ve screwed up, and (no matter how gruffly) tells you not to do it again, he’s acting out of concern for (1) you and (2) his/her community. It would be much easier to ignore you and filter you out of his/her life. If you can’t manage to be grateful, at least have a little dignity, don’t whine, and don’t expect to be treated like a fragile doll just because you’re a newcomer with a theatrically hypersensitive soul and delusions of entitlement.
      Sometimes people will attack you personally, flame without an apparent reason, etc., even if you don’t screw up (or have only screwed up in their imagination). In this case, complaining is the way to screw up.
      These flamers are either “lamers” who don’t have a clue but believe themselves to be experts or would-be psychologists testing whether you’ll screw up. The other readers either ignore them or find ways to deal with them on their own. The flamers’ behavior creates problems for themselves, which don’t have to concern you.
      Don’t let yourself be drawn into a flame war, either. Most flames are best ignored — after you’ve checked whether they are flames, not pointers to how you have screwed up, and not cleverly ciphered answers to your real question (this happens as well).
      If You Can’t Get An Answer
      If you can’t get an answer, please don’t take it personally that we don’t feel we can help you. Sometimes the members of the asked group may simply not know the answer. No response is not the same as being ignored, though admittedly it’s hard to spot the difference from outside.
      In general, simply re-posting your question is a bad idea. This will be seen as pointlessly annoying. Have patience: the person with your answer may be in a different time zone and asleep. Or it may be that your question wasn’t well-formed, to begin with.
      There are other sources of help you can go to, often sources better adapted to a novice’s needs.
      That said Chapter 8 wants you to share your questions and answers in the provided forums.  This page of extensive tips is not intended to discourage you from participating, Rather, we want everyone to build a reliable, trustworthy, open, and friendly community of RVers with both knowledge and heart. We are all in this together. 
      How To Answer Questions in a Helpful Way
      Be gentle. Problem-related stress can make people seem rude or stupid even when they’re not.
      Reply to a first offender offline. There is no need for public humiliation for someone who may have made an honest mistake. A real newbie may not know how to search archives or where the FAQ is stored or posted.
      If you don’t know for sure, say so! A wrong but authoritative-sounding answer is worse than none at all. Don’t point anyone down the wrong path simply because it’s fun to sound like an expert. Be humble and honest; set a good example for both the querent and your peers.
      If you can’t help, don’t hinder. Don’t make jokes about procedures that could trash the user’s setup — the poor sap might interpret these as instructions.
      Ask probing questions to elicit more details. If you’re good at this, the querent will learn something — and so might you. Try to turn the bad question into a good one; remember we were all RV newbies once.

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