My questions disappearing ...

[Charles Curley]

On Sat, Oct 07, 2006 at 07:04:50PM +0300, Heikki Pesonen wrote:
> 
>    I have sent two times questions to fedora-list. But nothing of them has
>    appeared to my post. I have noticed that the topics discussed here are
>    usually on the higher level than my knowledge of Linux. I understand that
>    one  usually gets the answer to questions by googling and by all means
>    searching information from the Net. But  I am not quite young and I have it
>    difficult to read long stories from the display.
>    My two last mails had the topic
>    How to start Beagle Daemon from the command line? and Winhelp is empty?

As others have mentioned, your emails are making it to the list.

Now the question, why were they not answered? Possibly for any of
several reasons. Remember that almost everyone here is a volunteer,
and even the Red Hat paid staff are not paid to answer every
question. Folks may have passed on your questions because they didn't
know the answer or didn't know anything about the subject (the case
for me). It is not unusual for a question to go unanswered; mine
sometimes do. Please don't take it personally.

If you want an answer, you have to tickle our curiosity and get our
interest up.

It is very important to craft your subject line carefully. Many people
decide which message to read solely on the subject; that is my
policy. The one about Winhelp wasn't really about Winhelp, it was
about how to get some game running under wine. Had I seen a subject
"How to get game X running under wine?", I might have waited several
days for a more authoritative answer, then referred you to various
wine lists and to crossover office. Winhelp being empty for some
programs is a known problem, and probably not relevant to your game
problem.

You mention not being very young and having problems reading from the
display. I'm not very young either. As a professional, I may spend up
to 12 hours a day looking at the dang things. I highly recommend an
LCD display, and specifically a good one. Also talk to your
optometrist about glasses specifically for working with your
computer. Mine are monofocal with a coating designed to reduce
glare. Your optometrist can recommend other things you can do to
reduce the problem.

Having said that, a bit of reading for you (sorry): "How To Ask
Questions The Smart Way", Eric Steven Raymond and Rick Moen,
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html, and my own modest
(and shorter) effort, http://www.charlescurley.com/netiquette.html.

-- 

Charles Curley                  /"\    ASCII Ribbon Campaign
Looking for fine software       \ /    Respect for open standards
and/or writing?                  X     No HTML/RTF in email
http://www.charlescurley.com    / \    No M$ Word docs in email

Key fingerprint = CE5C 6645 A45A 64E4 94C0  809C FFF6 4C48 4ECD DFDB
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/attachments/20061007/70d65c2e/attachment-0001.sig>