Re: no info, no answer

[Rob Jackson] "Sometimes people just don't know what to include, so they include nothing."

I think that this might still be the right thing to do.

We had an epidemic last year of people dumping EVERYTHING about their computers - motherboard, MAC address (no kidding), etc. - and then pasting an ENTIRE error message into their post. In some cases, these went on for pages. We wound up deleting a ton of those because it made the pages too hard to read.

Not only that, the answer was usually something along the lines of, "Set your render to progressive frames." I don't know that I've ever seen one of those laundry lists of specs lead to the solution. Those extra details can actually get in the way of the answer.

If there's a missing detail or two in the original post, a follow-up question or two will get that information, and the solution follows after that. It works well for finding the answer, and I find that it engages people. Bring 'em back into the conversation, and they can find themselves moving from reading the Cow to posting in the Cow.

So it may seem on the surface that troubleshooting is faster when frontloading the details, but my experience is it doesn't work that way in practice. There are more benefits to letting things evolve on their own than trying to shape them too much at the start.

tw