<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0" ><tr><td valign="top" style="font: inherit;">Is there a way to count the 99% of people who read the posting and possibly go on to ask smarter questions?<br><br>Paul<br><br>--- On <b>Thu, 6/3/10, Rick Moen <i><rick@linuxmafia.com></i></b> wrote:<br><blockquote style="border-left: 2px solid rgb(16, 16, 255); margin-left: 5px; padding-left: 5px;"><br>From: Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com><br>Subject: Re: [conspire] (forw) ASK<br>To: conspire@linuxmafia.com<br>Date: Thursday, June 3, 2010, 11:55 AM<br><br><div class="plainMail">Quoting Tony Godshall (<a ymailto="mailto:tony@of.net" href="/mc/compose?to=tony@of.net">tony@of.net</a>):<br><br>> Wow. How do these people find you? You must be the top hit for some<br>> kind of really vague search query.<br><br>It's the thousands of technical and non-technical projects that hyperlink<br>from their help Web pages to ye olde "How to Ask
Questions the Smart<br>Way" essay.<br><br>Unfortunately, the crowning irony about that essay is that it functions<br>as an idiot magnet for the two co-authors (me and Eric Raymond): Out of<br>the untold number of people who stumble over that essay, the bottom 1%<br>are the ones who ignore all warnings to the contrary (including one<br>right _in_ the essay, near the top) and lob helpdesk questions for those<br>untold thousands of projects directly at the essay co-authors.<br><br>So, for years, I've been getting a blizzard of incoherent helpdesk<br>queries, where very often the querent doesn't even bother to say <br>what product or service he/she is asking about.<br><br>I might as well laugh, though, because nothing else helps. <br><br><br>_______________________________________________<br>conspire mailing list<br><a ymailto="mailto:conspire@linuxmafia.com" href="/mc/compose?to=conspire@linuxmafia.com">conspire@linuxmafia.com</a><br><a
href="http://linuxmafia.com/mailman/listinfo/conspire" target="_blank">http://linuxmafia.com/mailman/listinfo/conspire</a><br></div></blockquote></td></tr></table>