“It doesn’t work”
November 22, 2006
In the series on rants…
Most days, someone will pop up at the Plone mailing lists, chat room or in my inbox saying something like “I tried to do X, but it didn’t work.”
It may be irrational, but this annoys me so much I want to be rude to them. They took the time to ask for help, and then they included no useful information to help anyone help them. It’s doubly annoying if they’re talking about software I wrote or documentation I provided, since it implies there’s a problem with it, but gives me no chance of fixing it (or defending it, as it may be).
So, the next time something doesn’t work, ban the phrase “doesn’t work” from your vocabulary and think:
- What exactly did you do (be specific, i.e. break it down into steps)
- What did you expect to happen?
- What happened instead?
- Did you get an error? If so, describe it and supply any error messages
This isn’t terribly difficult and won’t take you very long, and it will get your issue resolved much, much quicker and gain you more respect.
Phew (again).
Speaking as one of those people who stated “it didn’t work” about one of your products, I appreciate your restraint on the list. Truth is, I feel like a dork posting anything, realizing that the questions I’m asking are most likely hopelessly naive and uninformed. I do make sure I search as much as possible in advance before even submitting to the mailing list, but the reality is sometimes even the best keywords to use in the search are often opaque. On the other hand, I have submitted detailed error descriptions, etc., only to hear the chirping of crickets as my post grows stale. Nonetheless, your points are well taken…
There are no stupid questions
We fully appreciate that not everyone knows how to express their problems, but almost always if you make an attempt, the thing you’re *trying* to say can be deduced from what you’re actually saying. If you resign with “it just doesn’t work”, that’s just an annoying way of giving up and ranting without giving any useful information.
It’s unfortunate when questions go unanswered, though I must say the Plone lists are fairly good at getting some kind of answer. A few hints, though:
- Concise but informative questions get good answers. No-one reads anything that’s seven paragraphs wrong (I’ll get flak for saying that…)
- Occasionally, I’ll see a question where I think I could have the answer, but I know it’d take me several hours of writing lots of emails over the next couple of days to help you and I just don’t have time. Doing some basic research to make sure you don’t need the most fundamental questions explained helps!
- Sometimes no-one knows the answer! This is your chance to become the expert in this field
- It’s OK to ask again after a week or two, if your re-post says “sorry, this is a repost, I now have some more information and …”, rather than “you bastards didn’t answer me the last time, what kind of heartless morons are you”…. you get the point
But seriously – there is extremely littl elitism in the Plone community (even if some people are quite terse in their responses, they generally mean well) and we care a lot about our new users. With a pinch of humility and patience, your questions will most likely get an answer.
[...] Martin Aspeli: âIt doesnât workâ [...]