DJ Adams

Help us to help you - good questions beget good answers

Composing good questions is important and will help your fellow community members answer them more easily. This post suggests some key aspects of a good question, and also gives some tips on how to respond.

The concept of Q&A in online communities goes back as far as I can remember, way before the days of the Web, even before the days of the Internet. And what's held true all this time is that the availability, quality and usefulness of the answers relates directly to the quality of the questions. Ask a question well, and you're more likely to get engagement from fellow community members and they're more likely to try to, and be able to, help you.

Almost 6 years ago I wrote a post "Help  us to help you - Share Your Code" which is still relevant today, but I thought this new post might be more appropriate with new information that will hopefully help us all build a corpus of Q&A content that is easy to add to and useful to refer to. Then and now I'm primarily referring to questions related to development topics, but the sentiments are relevant beyond that too.

Asking questions

Here's what a good question looks like:

(*In the case of CAP related questions, you can consider using the issues section of the CAP Community GitHub repo at bit.ly/cap-com)

While I've described some "Do"s, I'll list some "Don't"s which should be obvious but are probably worth listing enumerating here:

Responding to questions

There's an art to responding to questions too, here are some thoughts on that (note that I wrote "responding to questions", as there's more to it than just "answering"):

Upvoting and downvoting

There's a reason we have upvoting and downvoting buttons. If you think a question or answer is a good one, then upvote it with the up-arrow. It will help the author of the upvoted item understand that they provided something of value. If you feel you should downvote a question or an answer, do so but always provide a reason, as a comment, as to why you downvoted it.

If you're the OP and someone's provided an answer to your question that's appropriate, ensure you mark it as such.

Summary

Hopefully the advice in this post is useful. Some of it is practical, some of it is related to etiquette. I'll leave it up to you to work out which bits are what. It's not polite to ask a question "lazily", by not stating the problem clearly, not showing what efforts you've made to solve it, and by not making it as easy as possible for your fellow community members to help out.

Help us to help you, and let's do our best to build a valuable database of knowledge through the next decade.

For a more in-depth set of guidelines, see "Writing the perfect question" (thanks frehu for the pointer).

Examples

As and when I come across what I think are nice examples of good questions, I'll post links to them here.

Updates

2020-01-15 Added Examples section


Originally published on SAP Community