On Wed, Aug 04, 2021 at 12:35:29PM -0400, Polyna-Maude Racicot-Summerside wrote:
> Go try IRC and you'll see that this "Gunnar" is far from a exception and
> trolling may be the rule on such system (IRC).
At the moment, I see no evidence that Gunnar is trolling, although
obviously I could be mistaken. He seems to be struggling with the
English language, as well as the mailing list culture, as well as
the multiple technical problems he's having.
I'm guessing he has more experience with web forums, social media, or
"chat" systems than he does with mailing lists. His approach is one
that I've seen before, fortunately not often. What I've observed:
1) He does not take his time to compose messages and consolidate all
of the information available. Rather, he writes whatever thought
he has in the moment, and sends it immediately. If he has another
thought 30 seconds later, he sends that as well, in a new message,
possibly even a new thread.
2) His writing is disorganized, in a way that goes beyond struggling
with the language. He doesn't lay out a clear message -- "This is
what I want to do, here is what I tried, and here is what happened."
Even if he struggles with English, he should still be able to draw
a basic outline of the situation.
Most of his messages are so disjointed that I don't even attempt to
piece together what he's asking. I've just been deleting them.
3) He has information available that he is *not* giving us. This is the
most frustrating aspect. I don't know about other readers, but this
instantly raises red flags for me. I immediately suspect that
we're getting an intentionally misleading picture, and possibly
outright lies, in addition to the omissions.
On IRC, what this usually means is that the user in question is not
running Debian. And yet they want #debian to support them. They
*know* that they will not be supported when it becomes known that
they're not running Debian, and yet they withhold information, they
deceive, and they sometimes lie, all in some sort of desperate attempt
to get support from the wrong channel. This happens *way* too often.
Here's what I would suggest to Gunnar, and to anyone else who is not
getting the responses they want from a mailing list:
1) Only try to solve one problem at a time. Pick the problem that you
want to solve first, and focus exclusively on that. Don't get
side-tracked.
2) Put all of the information you have into one message. If people have
to collect your information from multiple separate messages, it
greatly reduces the chances that people will spend the time and
energy required to do this.
3) Take your time writing. Mailing lists are not chat systems. You
will not get an answer in seconds. The people who respond to you
will also take their time, trying to compose a useful reply.
Your message, and the responses to it, will be archived and available
for the whole world to see, forever. Try to make a good impression.
Be sure to proofread. Spelling, grammar, and content errors will all
cause confusion, especially in readers who are not fluent in English,
or who are not top-tier experts in whatever technical issue you're
having. If you're not fluent in English, just do the best you can.
4) Actually compose your message. Don't just write random sentences;
write something that's easy to follow.
Try to structure your message the way you would structure a school
essay. Paragraphs should be coherent, with a main point (topic)
and supporting details. Events that occur in chronological sequence
should be written that way ("first A happens, then B happens").
Don't write more than you have to, but don't write *less* than you need
either. Skipping steps in your writing makes it a lot harder for
the reader to follow.
5) Make sure your goal is clear. The Subject: header should be a brief
summary of your issue, and the first paragraph of the body should be
a longer description of it. If a random stranger can't tell what
you're trying to do after reading the first paragraph, then your
message isn't clear enough yet.
6) Provide all of the necessary details. At a bare minimum, this should
include which version of Debian you're running, because this *is* a
Debian mailing list. If your problem isn't about Debian, it's not
on topic.
If you're having a problem, you should provide enough information to
reproduce the problem. What steps do you perform, from start to
finish? What do you see/hear? Does the problem happen every time,
or only sometimes? If you can reproduce the problem in a terminal
session, then please paste that terminal session into the body of
your message. If the problem only happens in X or Wayland, try to
describe what you're doing, and what's happening, as best you can.
If you're trying to accomplish something, then there won't always
be a description of steps taken, because you might not even know
how to begin. But if you *did* try something already (which didn't
work), it would be helpful to say what you tried, and what happened,
and how this differs from your desired outcome.
If you're using a specific piece of software, tell us exactly what it
is -- its name and its version number. If it came from Debian, give
us the Debian package's version number. If it did *not* come from
Debian, be sure to say this, and tell us where it came from, and its
upstream version number.
7) If people request additional information, please provide it. However,
there's some judgment required here.
Sometimes, people will request information you've already given; in
these cases, you need to decide whether it's best to repeat yourself,
or to point out the previous message containing the information, or
to ignore this particular response for the moment.
You may also want to wait a bit before providing additional information,
in case other people ask for even more. If you get several requests
for information, it's usually best if you consolidate them all and
reply with a single message that contains *all* of the additional
information. This goes back to the point about putting as much
information as possible into a single message. It's *much* easier
to help you if all of the inforation we need is in one place.
That's probably enough for now.
