Sorry to put this on the dev list, but the folks who read this are also some of the "heavy hitters" on the user list....
I'm seeing questions on the users list of the form "help, it doesn't work", which then requires people to guess, ask for clarification, etc. I often try to grab them long enough to ask for more information and take some of the load off the folks who really know things, but I'm starting to get frustrated with the number of really vague posts that require three back-and-forths before anything useful comes of it. In, I admit, 2 minutes of looking I couldn't find anything on the SOLR site about how to use the user's list. Would it be useful If I created a much gentler (and shorter) version of http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html? If it'd be useful, is it worth putting on the SOLR website? Or maybe Chris would be willing to put it on his apache page so we could link to it easily. My goal here would be to have something welcoming (the above is pretty darn off-putting, even if it accurately reflects my reactions sometime), but at the same time conveying that there are things the poster can do to 1> get answers much more quickly and 2> stop wasting everyone's time (OK, a little frustration there). I know my first questions on the Lucene list sure could have used a bit of etiquette guidance, but I'm not sure I'd have appreciated something in the tone of the link above. That said, I'm tired of typing the same request for more information over and over and over....... Or, someone could say "Do you mean this page <url here>" and I'll just blush in the privacy of my study.... Whaddya think? Erick
