On 7/27/25 4:11 PM, Anders Andersson wrote:
On Sun, Jul 27, 2025 at 5:39 PM Richard Owlett <[email protected]> wrote:More explicitly: How should I [who has *ability* to hyperfocus mitigated by distractibility {cf ADHD}] ask questions in this particular forum? Why do I ask? In my read with PDF related questions, my responses were essentially "Why are you trying to do?" rather than an answer to to a narrowly focused question. A correct, but skew answer, could have been "to gain dietary information to lower probability of another heart attack". Nutritionists had given me answers that more a set of intermediary goals than actual things I could apply to daily life. I had discovered a USDA document[1] that came close to being useful and was trying to think of a presentation format that would meet multiple goals. I hadn't yet determined that format, thus could not answer questions being asked. In the meantime [GRIN] I have discovered the source documents[2][3] used in preparing the above. Now I have to relearn how to extract specific content from spreadsheets. Something I haven't done in close to two decades. But *THE* question remains. How to ask narrowly focused questions which will get answers in this forum?The Debian user mailing list is one of the worse examples in my (limited) experience. Every question gets non-answered by a bunch of people who don't really know about your exact situation, but think they have some valuable input. Often the same bunch of people who then ends up talking to each other. Comparing with for example the OpenBSD user mailing list is like night and day. For specific questions it may be better to try the stack exchange network, which is designed for that purpose - weed out the "just my two cents" people. It's easier to ignore non-answers, and people can't keep adding on to them. There are of course different problems with stack exchange, which is pretty bad when you just want advice or when you don't know where to start looking.
That forum often has useful hits to my DuckDuckGo searches. I've yet to grok how to navigate web based fora.
