How to get a good response on stackexchange
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| Number of Parts | 351 | |
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| License | CC Attribution 3.0 Unported: You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor. | |
| Identifiers | 10.5446/69105 (DOI) | |
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| Language | ||
| Production Year | 2022 |
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00:00
Video gameSoftware developerOpen sourceDependent and independent variablesGoodness of fitInformation technology consultingStack (abstract data type)Computer animation
00:31
Dependent and independent variablesSlide ruleCodeQuicksortInternet forumQR codeComputer programmingProcess (computing)Slide ruleMultiplication signOpen sourceServer (computing)Wave packetProjective planeRange (statistics)Stack (abstract data type)Computer animation
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CASE <Informatik>Dependent and independent variablesMereologyPoint cloudType theoryClassical physicsMereologyMetropolitan area networkPoint cloudElectric generatorGoodness of fitComputer animation
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Dependent and independent variablesVideoconferencingSource codeSoftware developerRootSquare numberWebsiteBuffer overflowInformationSystem programmingView (database)GeometryVirtual machineCoordinate systemShape (magazine)Physical systemIdentity managementExtension (kinesiology)DecimalBeta functionTexture mappingRegulärer Ausdruck <Textverarbeitung>Rule of inferenceCodeComputer networkPoint (geometry)Image resolutionVotingPower (physics)BitFreewareComputer fileAlgebraic closureString (computer science)Exception handlingRoboticsSlide ruleService (economics)Computer programmingRevision controlThermal conductivityWeb 2.0Web browserMultiplication signStack (abstract data type)Online helpText editorWeb pageAxiom of choiceRule of inferenceRootData managementOpen sourceLocal ringDigital photographySoftware maintenanceSoftwareFilm editingTask (computing)Level (video gaming)Design by contractExpert systemCodeLimit (category theory)File formatShape (magazine)Server (computing)QuicksortProgrammer (hardware)WebsiteDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Point (geometry)InformationProjective planeProbability density functionLink (knot theory)Image resolutionHome pageResultantMobile appArc (geometry)Product (business)Greatest elementGoodness of fitFormal languageError messageDependent and independent variablesComputer reservations systemElectronic mailing listVideo gameInternet forumSoftware bugDefault (computer science)RepetitionVirtual machineCalculationNumberSupercomputerQR codeView (database)EmailPhysical systemMereologyAddress space1 (number)TwitterPolygonSoftware developerAreaGoogolCASE <Informatik>Field (computer science)NeuroinformatikCrash (computing)Focus (optics)Interface (computing)LaptopSign (mathematics)TouchscreenBoss CorporationLengthOperator (mathematics)Buffer overflowBookmark (World Wide Web)Coordinate systemCurveMappingLine (geometry)Factory (trading post)IdentifiabilityMedical imagingReading (process)Inclusion mapInverter (logic gate)Control flowFlow separationModule (mathematics)Scripting languageOperating systemOverlay-NetzComputer animation
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:02
OK, good afternoon, everybody. So we're here for the first of our afternoon sessions. So we have three talks in here. Our first talk is by Ian Turton, a well-known member of the community who revealed his private life at the last Phosphogee. He's a part-time developer with Aston Tech and Consultants,
00:20
and I guess a full-time open source developer. And his talk's going to be how to get a good response on Stack Exchange. So as you said, I'm Ian. I work at Aston Technology.
00:40
I provide coding, support, training. I don't remember what my job title is, because it keeps changing. We run a range of training programs and support for various open source projects. And then in my spare time, I'm a moderator at the GIS Stack Exchange and a regular contributor to the GeoTools GeoServer, that sort of thing.
01:03
To save everybody trying to take pictures of all the slides, I thought I'd just put a QR code up that you can scan. If you're now trying to think where the hell did I put my QR code reader, I'll put that code up again at the end. So just to give you a feel for what this talk is about,
01:21
this is one of my classic old man rants at the cloud type talks. I used to do highly technical talks, but it turns out nobody really wants to go and listen to those. So now I mostly just rant about the younger generation, how they're no good. And this is really part three, which you may remember me from previous Phosphagy rants, such as the one in Seoul
01:43
about earning your support instead of buying it, and the one that we did in 2019 and in 2021, the secret life of open source developers I did with Andrea. You get the slides, these do link in. They don't any longer, because they converted my nice PDF
02:01
into a PowerPoint, and it script all the links out. But there are links to them in the ones you can download from my website. So what is Stack Exchange? Who here has been to Stack Exchange and used it? I hardly need to explain what it is. So it's a site where you can ask and answer questions.
02:25
Obviously, we try not to be quite as aggressive as this guy or quite as fast in response as this one, but there we go. It's also the original Stack Overflow is where all the programmers in the room go and copy cases of code
02:40
to stick together to make their programs. It's even better if you can find your own code examples from earlier in your life and copy those back in. You truly feel that you've done well then, but you can't upvote the answer as being a good answer when it's yours. So that's what it actually looks like. So it's a list of questions.
03:01
We've got 19,000-odd questions on the GIS one. If you go over to the main Stack Overflow site, there's millions of questions there. And variously, things get upvoted. So you can see here, maybe, not quite on that resolution, but this one's got 83 votes, so how to start web mapping.
03:23
It's one of our most popular questions. It's got 31 different answers, and it's had 62,000 views, or it had when I took this screenshot. Identifying coordinate system of shapefile when unknown. Have they forgot to send me the Proj file? What do I do? Which also has 105 upvotes as being a useful question
03:42
that people have used and discovered, and has 16 answers about how you could possibly get around this problem. So those people in the room who didn't put their hand up because they don't use Stack Exchange, you should still care about asking a good question. Because when you actually want to talk
04:00
to your tech support team, there's nothing in tech support we like better than being able to write, can you send me some log files or some more details and then pass that ticket back to you? Because that means we've met our service level agreement of responding within 30 minutes. So we don't have to do any more work, but we're going to bill you for 30 minutes anyway. So if you put all of the useful information
04:21
in your question to start with, we actually have to do some work when you send it to us. Rather than just keep batting it back to you for more information for a week or two until we've got time to deal with it. So you'll find that your help desk or support team do that to you, whether you know it or not. And if I've got a choice of three questions to answer,
04:40
I'm going to answer the one that gives me the most help to answer it, rather than the one where I have to keep ringing you up to ask you more questions. So these are all useful things to do. To misquote Tolstoy from Anna Karenina, all happy users are alike. Each unhappy user is unhappy in his own way. And this is a problem, you're stuck, you've got a problem,
05:03
you're in a hurry, your homework's due in tomorrow morning, you promised the project manager you'd get this feature fitted before the end of the sprint, you promised your boss that you'd fix this customer's problem, and this stupid program won't do what you want it to do.
05:21
Don't just open up your browser and launch into a rant. Because developers are people. We don't like it when you rant about our software. If you come and ask us a nice, politely phrased question, we'll do almost anything in our power to come and help you. So take a deep breath. Remember, nobody owes you an answer.
05:41
Obviously, the exception to this is if you're paying a lot of maintenance fees, which includes a support contract. So some software that we probably shouldn't mention here. You probably can get annoyed with the support team if they don't help you, if you're just losing QGIS and you haven't paid anybody, nobody owes you an answer. We're doing this for fun most of the time.
06:02
So if you're rude and unhelpful, it stops being fun and I stop helping you. I can walk away without any problems. If you break any of our rules, and I use break in inverted commas, they're, you know, they're stupid rules, some of them, but they're the rules that have been set up on the site. So stick to them.
06:21
Your question will get closed otherwise. And try and make your question right the first time because most people will look at your question once and if it hasn't had any of the information, I need to answer. If it just says QGIS crashes every time I try and do an operation, I can't help you with that. I need to know what operation, what did your data look like?
06:41
What computer are you running on? Are you running on a Raspberry Pi or are you running on a Cray supercomputer? That makes a difference to why it's gonna crash. If you don't have any of that information in the first time I look at your question, I probably won't ever see it again, unless it comes up in the moderator's queue to be closed because it's a bad question.
07:00
So few things that you need to avoid at all costs. Spam, don't spam us. We'll delete your account. We will nuke you so badly that nobody will ever know you ever existed on Stack Exchange, okay? Nobody will ever buy your product or app as a result of seeing spam on Stack Exchange. It's not what people go there for.
07:22
Surprisingly, people do show up and try and spam us every so often, but you probably never notice because we delete them quite quickly. Four or five people will send me a note within the first hour of the question being there and I will make sure nobody else gets to see it. Trolling, provoking other users.
07:43
As Calvin says here, we don't spend nearly enough scientific research finding a cure for jerks. We have a code of conduct. You should really respect it. It boils down to don't be rude to other people. You can get banned. You can get a one-week ban. You can get a year's ban if you're really bad.
08:01
You've gotta get annoyed several times before you're gonna get a year's ban. And nobody will want to answer your questions. Everybody will remember you're a bit of a rude jerk. And you'll think, oh, I don't feel like answering this question. I'll go and do something else. Don't paste pictures of your text in. This is some sort of millennial thing, I think. I don't understand it at all. It's really hard to read on my phone
08:21
and I've got very focal glasses, okay? I can try hard to read it, but it just doesn't work. Google and the other robots that scan this website can't read your text in a photo either. I can't auto-translate it if you happen to have some German or some Spanish in your photo. It's just, it's not good.
08:40
I can't cut and paste it into my editor to test your code to find out what was going wrong. So we will close your question until such time as you can be bothered to actually cut and paste the text into the question. It's not hard. It's less hard than making a picture of your thing. I've had people taking pictures of their laptop screen with their phone to paste into their question.
09:00
No, no, don't do that. Read the fine manual. Anybody who's been around computing for any length of time would have been told to RTFM. Not just read your manual, but check, see if anybody's asked you a question before. You know, do you think there's a possibility that maybe somebody's been sent a shapefile
09:21
without the Proj file before, and you don't need to answer this question again? Just trust me, it has been asked already. Try Google. You know, just Google the error message and see what pops up. You'll probably find another question and an answer on it. The Stack Exchange itself has a very good search toolbar.
09:42
You can limit it by tags and free text search. Again, if nothing comes up, then you've got a new and interesting question for us to answer. If something comes up, at least look at them and see whether they answer your question before you host another one, because it will save me doing it.
10:00
If you do that, if you don't, we will close it and mark it as a duplicate question, and you'll find that when you Google, you often find that you can end up doing a string of duplicate closures, but you'll eventually get back to the root question that was first asked. Read the local rules and guidelines in the tour. You get a badge for this.
10:21
Stack Exchange is all about winning rewards. You get points for being upvoted. You get badges for doing certain tasks. And reading the help page is one of the things that gets you a badge. It's how we can always tell when people haven't read the help page, because we can see whether they've got that badge or not.
10:41
Don't, if we do close your question, we say it needs more detail, or we'd like you to take the paste image out and put some text in, or it's a duplicate, don't just repost the question an hour later and hope we won't notice. Oddly enough, we will. So it's a sign that we want you to fix your question,
11:01
and then we'll consider reopening it for you. If you just repost it, we're gonna close that one too. We'll mark that as a duplicate of your first closed one. And we can keep doing that all day. It's a single button I can press on the interface that I get that you probably don't see because I'm a moderator.
11:21
When you edit your question, it automatically gets flagged for reopening and somebody will review your question, see if you've improved it enough and reopen it for you. If we think it's a duplicate and you don't think it's a duplicate, that's fair enough, because I've spent less than a minute probably assessing your question and whether it's a duplicate of one I've seen a year ago. Add some text in that explains
11:41
why it's not a duplicate of the one I closed it as. A duplicate of. Explain where I went wrong. It's fine. Be polite about it, because otherwise I won't reopen it. But I'm happy to reopen your question if you can explain to me why the one I said was a duplicate isn't. So those are the things that will get your answer closed or deleted.
12:02
If you want to get a good answer, ask a focus question. And these are a couple of quotes from our help page. So focus back questions on an actual problem you've faced. Include the details of what you have tried and exactly what you were trying to do. So again, don't just say it crashes
12:21
or I'm trying to move a polygon. At least tell me which program you were using. Give me some clues. Not all questions work in our format, so try not to ask primarily opinion-based questions. So we get a lot of questions like, we're trying to decide whether to use ArcGIS or ArcGIS Map, ArcPro or QGIS.
12:40
What do you guys think? And that's just gonna dissolve into a rant and a riot and a flame war. It's not gonna get a single definitive answer, which is what we're looking for on the site. So we'll try and encourage you not to post that sort of question. There are other places you can ask that. Go to Reddit or Twitter.
13:01
We'll rant about it on Twitter for days if you're careful. But don't be too focused. So this question here, I have various shape files, .tab, .mif, .shx, .kml, and would like to parse the CRS from them. And that was the whole question. So A, they're not all shape files, but none of those are shape files.
13:23
And why do you want to parse the CRS from them? What's your end goal? What sort of language were you thinking of using? Again, give me some clues. And as I say, some questions are just so off the wall that we can't work out what you're trying to do. So we're genuinely asking you to add more detail when we put comment on the bottom of that.
13:43
Use some tags to help people locate and or ignore your questions. So for example, if you tag your question as being about ArcPro, I'll never see it. Unless it shows up in the moderator cues, but I don't see it on the homepage because I don't know anything about ArcPro. I'm never going to be able to answer those questions.
14:01
If you put a tag about GeoServer, I've got those colored in yellow so that they stand out on the homepage and I see them instantly and I can answer them as soon as I can see them. You can use tags for searching. As I say, you can highlight questions or hide questions based on the tags. So try and tag it.
14:20
Again, it gives me a clue as to what program you're thinking of using. Go and gain some reputation. You'll start off with a reputation of one. If people find your question useful, they upvote it, you get 10 points per upvote, I think. If they don't like it, they'll downvote it. You lose two points for a downvote.
14:41
So even if you end up at a net zero for your questions votes, you're still eight points ahead of the day. You can also gain reputation by answering questions. And a lot of people just think that Stack Exchange is somewhere you go to get answers and ask questions, but answer some questions. You are almost certainly more of an expert than some of the people posting questions on GIS Stack Exchange about something.
15:02
Have a look at the questions. Give it a go. Have a think. Could you answer that question with a bit of thought? Go for it. Put an answer in there. While I got to learn so much about QGIS was by answering other people's questions about QGIS questions, thinking, well, that should be possible. I wonder how you do that.
15:21
As I say, you can gain badges. So you get one for reading the help page. I think you get one for filling your name and your email address. So anybody you see with less than three bronze badges clearly hasn't been doing very much because you get one for answering a question as well the first time. And you can get bronze badges, silver badges, and gold badges.
15:43
Again, you're more likely to help somebody that you see as being an active part of the community rather than somebody who's just turned up, has picked the default username of user 12456X or whatever number it is that the system allocates you. So put your name on it. Be proud of your contributions.
16:01
As I say, tell me what you're trying to do. So this is, I'm trying to calculate areas, of polygons in the field. What's your projection? What's your data look like? What operating system are you on? How can I reproduce this problem on my machine so I can see what's going on? And that's especially particularly if you're trying to report what you think is a bug.
16:20
99 times out of 100, it's your data's wrong. You're trying to feed invalid polygons through the project and it's failing because of that, or you've messed up your projection somehow. Show me what went wrong and what you expected. Don't just tell me it crashed every time I do it. What do you actually care about?
16:41
What formats your data in? Things like that. There you go, so this is a GeoServer one. Tell me what GeoServer things went wrong. Don't just tell me that you've got a 503 error, which is the server saying GeoServer didn't start up. You've already told me that in question. Find me the bit of the log file that shows me why it didn't start up
17:01
and I can almost certainly tell you what the problem was. In this case, it's almost certainly you added the wrong version of the community module. That's always the problem. So when I then put this bit on and say, could people show me their log file? They then dump 150 megs of log file into the question. And I only want the last little bit. I want the line that starts caused by.
17:23
Network, beans, factory, no such definition. That will be the important bit. Don't ask the same question again and again. So back to duplicates. This is one of our favorites, is I'm trying to overlay shapefile on a geographic base map, but it doesn't line up. The answer to that is you set the projection
17:41
instead of re-projecting it. You lied to QGIS about what projection was. Don't do that. What have you tried and what didn't fix your issue? I've read many posts that didn't solve my problem. Which ones? Put a little list in. Then I won't suggest those fixes for you again. What went wrong?
18:03
Okay, so you've asked a great question and you've got an answer or maybe you didn't. If the answer worked for you, then accept it. It's a little green tick on next to your question. You say, I accepted it. That shows to future people who come and look at this question, this is the answer that worked for me.
18:21
Preferably upvoted as well because you should reward the person who gave you the answer. I think they get 25 points. They get 15 points if you're accepting the answer and 10 if you upvote it. So answering questions is a good way of getting reputation. And as I say, reputation is everything on Stack Exchange.
18:40
No answers and I fixed it myself in the end with a lot of Googling. Well, write the answer down under your question so the next person who finds this problem can solve it. It's perfectly legal. It's not cheating to answer your own questions. You can get double points for this. So you can get 25 points for answering the question and you got the 10 points for asking the question in the first place.
19:03
If you find yourself solving a tricky problem at work, ask a question and then answer it on Stack Exchange because that way you can find that answer when you Google for the problem in a year's time when you try and do it. I find my own answers on Stack Exchange all the time as solutions to problems I can't remember how to solve.
19:20
So, concluding, be polite, we're all volunteers. I'm wearing my Stack Exchange hat as well because people often ask how much money you make being a Stack Exchange volunteer. And I can tell you, I've been a moderator for 10 years now so it's a 10th of a hat a year and a fifth of a t-shirt per year. So, you know, I'm getting rich slowly.
19:44
So search before you ask, be respectful, vote early, vote often. There is a limit you can't use more than 250 votes in a day. I don't think I've ever managed to do that but you do get a badge if you do do it. And answer other people's questions so that way you can get some more points.
20:01
And there's the QR code for the slides again if people want.