Give me the EXACT command! Getting answers from Usenet

A newsgroup post caught my eye this morning. It read "Which is the exact command ...". I've seen others like that, often with "exact" capitalized or exclamation points added or both. It's frustration on the part of the person asking: they don't want a hint, they don't want to understand how something works, just give them the damn command that will fix this!

Unfortunately, that's the kind of post that will get ignored by most of the people who could help. It's partly a culture clash: people who respond to newsgroup posts tend toward didactic personalities. They aren't there to give answers really, they are there to teach. There's also the problem that very often there just isn't one exact answer: if X is true then you need to do Y, but if not, you may need to do Z. Combine those two and more often than not our desperate petitioner gets either no answer or gets a lousy answer from someone who really doesn't answer the question well.

The lousy answer now causes the people who ignored the orginal question to respond. It's open season now: no more requirement to be exact, and every reason to explain in detail why any answers that were given are insufficient and inferior. The original poster now has an answer, but of course it wasn't the "exact command" they wanted.

If you are going to post questions on Usenet or any website, don't ask for "exact commands". Doing that will probably just delay useful answers. If you don't know how to do something, why would you assume that there even is an "exact command"? There may be, and if there is you will get a short, succint answer, but if there is not, you need the detail, so don't set up for failure by telling people you don't want to hear it!

Instead, use the psychology of the group to your advantage: ask for help. Appeal to the teacher personality: explain that you are "trying to understand", or that you are "confused", or "need to learn". Those are trigger words that turn on the answer faucet.

Explain what you are trying to do and why you are trying to do it. The "why" is quite important, but unfortunately often left out, and it's quite possible that you are way off base and really need to do something else entirely.

By the way, don't do the "suck-up" thing. Referring to "the gurus here" is seen for what it is and won't help you. It also may turn off someone who could help but doesn't think of themselves as truly expert.

Do include relevant information. Don't say "I got an error message when I tried to add the user". Instead, keep these in mind:

What did you actually do?
What did you expect to happen?
What actually happened?

Those three things are critical to getting good answers. See Newsgroups and Mailing Lists for more suggestions along that line.

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