[utunbu]

> April 8: it seems there's now a mock-up of sorts from the team. Inside the group, we start talking about that situation where if you mail the $open_source_project mailing list asking for help with a legitimate problem, nothing happens, but if you make up a shitty version of something and fire it off, then suddenly 50 million people show up and go OI! DO IT THIS WAY! But, three months earlier when you politely asked for help, zip, nothing, nada, zilch.

This seems quite interesting to me. I haven't really got chances to interact with mailing lists, is this really the case?

[haukem]

Yes I would say this is a case when someone wants to contribute something to an open source project.

Often these initial questions are very unspecific and often as a maintainer you only get the question, answer it and then never see this person again. Time wasted.

When someone already wrote code and want to contribute it you know that the person already invested some time and is seriously about implementing some stuff. Here the likelihood that your time is wasted is much less.

[utunbu]

I see, this makes a lot sense. I guess perhaps community forums and IRCs are better places for those initial and unspecific questions?

[MrDOS]

IMO there are very few places where it's appropriate to ask unspecific questions. IRC and forums are “better” for them in the sense that there's a tighter response loop on narrowing down what the asker is actually interested in, but it's still a waste of time for everyone involved. Being able to ask questions well is a skill, and everyone has to learn it somehow, but it's generally better for everyone if the question includes too much situation-specific detail than too little.