I mean all the thread titles with 0. I think it would attract attention, someone sees an easy one that they can do and just does it beacuse it was there. Someone not incliened to dig through the posts might answer one because he saw a title of something he knew.

But I do see your point

Damn. Oh, well. It was worth a shot.

I agree as well... that would be incredibly inconvenient for those of us who know how to post.

Exactly - and this problem is going to be consistent without either
a) an agreement with a image hosting service in exachange for, say, ads
- or -
b) hosting the images on LQ

An interesting phenomenon I noticed yesterday as I tried to answer questions of those who knew less than me (a very small category is that the LQ forums seem to follow a power law. There were many, many posts with 0 or 1 replies and a few posts with >50 replies.

I think this reflects two things. First of all, a lot of the >50 replies were "flame"-type questions such as "Which WM is the best?", "Should the command line go away?", "Which distro should I use?" All these require opinionated answers, not any great knowledge of Linux.

If we factor these out, I think we find that there are some questions that everyone deals with and, therefore, everyone is able to answer. Then there are those questions that occur due to the double-edged sword of choice in Linux. I have the choice to do anything I want - custom kernels, custom distros, custom WMs, etc The more customization one does, the less chance that someone else will have a similar setup and when you run into some obscure problem, it's hard for people to reproduce it.

As a mild example of this - I asked a question about why I only had audio in KDE and not other WMs. It took almost 24 hours for someone to suggest alsamixer. Why? Anyone who never strayed from the nice, comforting, WinXP-like KDE wouldn't have expereienced this. Even now, I don't know WHY it happened, just how to fix it.

And, of course, as other people have mentioned numerous times on this thread and others, sometimes the person just doesn't know how to phrase their problem or even how to write a subject. Yesterday I actually saw a subject "AaaaaahhhH!". That doesn't tell me anything about whether I should click on it. It could be about selinux (which I can't answer) or about Fedora (which I might be able to answer). But I think people get better as they spend more time on the forums and realize that if they want people to read their posts, they need to come up with a good one-liner for their problem. It's not an easy task, but it's doable.

I wonder how many people can follow the idealistic principles of Mr. Eric S Raymond in his how to ask questions the smart way. That's why I never recommend that essay to anybody... I can see and accept the world for what it is, not what I think it should be like.

It is tough to ask a smart question unless you're sure of what you're asking help for. And most people seem to have problems even with that on many occasions.

The problem is that if people can follow his idealistic advice, they might as well solve the problem themselves. We have got to accept that most people who visit forums for help simply don't have the diagnostic skills or the time and knowledge to frame questions smartly or research the problem and find the solution themselves.

In other words, those who do (re)search will most likely find answers themselves. Those who ask here rarely (re)search if at all. Some of the questions they frame have answers right in the top of a simple google search result..

We have to accept this... I don't believe this will change...

Well, as you can clearly see, I do keep his article in my signature. I think it is both entertaining and informative, and I think that people can ask better questions by following just a few of the guiding principles he establishes in the article. I'm not asking for a perfect "smart question", but at least providing us with the full information would be nice.

When both I and LQ were a few years younger, I found it (LQ) an invaluable resource as I started out on Linux.

I can't remember the last time I asked a question here (they tend to go to forums.gentoo.org as they are gentoo (usually portage) specific).
I'm happy to lurk here and answer if I can - a form of "quid pro quo".

We all grow, and hopefully have something to offer as that happens. So todays "question only" newbie will hopefully become a contributing "guru".

Before I even signed up on LQ, I use to lurk here and use the search function a lot. After realising how useful this was to me, I registered. At that time, I was a happy Linux user but not very confident, so I didn't answer many questions. As I learnt more and got confident, I replied to a lot more threads. I am sure all those who are lurking at the moment will eventually answer more questions as they get more proficient with Linux. Obviously there are some who will be here just to gain other peoples knowledge and not contribute much but that happens anywhere in life. There will also be those who are too lazy to use the search function and we keep getting the same questions everyday.

You know, I'm still a "newb" on the Gentoo forums, even though I nearly exclusively use Gentoo. It's hard to leave a community like this. Most of my questions end up being answerable here because they are about a particular piece of software, or hardware related. Since I can (kind of) hack portage and ebuilds a bit, I have few very-gentoo-esque questions. But hey, whatever works.

Harishankar - rather than point at ESR's essay, link them to my similar essay - it's a bit less "idealistic"

XavierP nice article. I while back I took the lengthy "How to ask smart questions" article and paraphrased/reworded it for the Mozilla Firefox forum.How To Ask Questions The Smart Way - MozillaZine Forums
Mostly because I was tired of people asking the same stupid questions over and over again. Unfortunately it didn't really help.

Or they would post I read the article and did every thing it said, but still don't know the answer. Duh if they had searched or read the stickies they would have found the answer 90% of the time.

Face it people are lazy if they can be spoon fed the answer why bother to look. I am relatively new to Linux but not to the Internet, it is just the way people are. On any forum with this many members and the volume of posts the same questions and flames are going to show up again and again.

The Moderators here do a great job keep up the good work.

People are lazy. The (I think) professional developers who ask for help in "Programming" and get all upset when I point them to resources bother me a bit.... but I guess it's human nature.

I too, ask many more questions than I "try" to help with. I'm learning. To offset this inequity, I contribute $$. In this manner, while not racking up posts, I can add to the site. I would like to see the suggestion that this is an equally "honorable" way to contribute to the site for those with limited knowledge and/or limited time.
I agree with DJOtaku - the search engine on this site drives me up a wall!

I do hope everyone understands that my intent was not to chastize anyone or criticize. I just like to examine the sociology of online communities, and occasionally speak my mind. I do appreciate (and I'm sure Jeremy does as well) those who are able to donate to this site. I guess, as a college student/part-time student assistant, my contribution is in the reverse.