What's the most polite/effective next step when you can't get assistance via forums?

1st Official Post

    Hi everyone!

    As stated in the subject, I'm having trouble getting answers sometimes - I realize many, including myself, have so much going on, that they're often on here to ask questions and not answer them, but I'm really looking for assistance on a particular matter after teaching myself quite a bit and still managing to fail. What do you guys try when you don't receive a response regarding something you're really trying to resolve.

    I may see better results with more concise questions; anyway - at this point I'm referring to one particular thread: thread-7147.html

    (Shout-out to Chewitt for your earlier assistance - I know that you have me headed at least in the right direction.)

    Alex

    • Official Post

    I'm sure you know this already, but everyone on the LE team is a volunteer, each with his amount of computer knowledge. Then there is the fact that people indeed have daytime jobs, as well as a family life. For now, I'm getting a nagging feeling that one of the kids here is not getting its answers fast enough, and craving for more attention than the attention other kids get.

    Asking "Anyone out there" just two hours after your own previous post in your other linked topic is pushing the limit IMO.
    Creating a topic after a single day titled (loosely translated) "Where to get help when you can't get quick enough assistance via forums" is annoying IMO.

    I can understand that you want your setup to be 100.000000% perfect as soon as possible, but that simply doesn't always happen within a couple of days.
    If your questions are Linux or Android specific, I'm sure there are other forums/irc channels as well where you can explain your situation.

    We do like to challenge our users to learn from experience and be autodidactic whenever possible. We are not always inclined to hold peoples' hands to the very end in solving each and every one of their problems.

    Klojum,

    I completely get what you're saying, and I understand why I may have come off that way to you - however - you've got me wrong, and if you notice, I was quite polite in the post, asking for assistance with posting technique. I've experienced this trend whereby I simply don't receive responses to politely asked questions yet I see others post after me and receive a response before me. I literally want to know - am I giving too much detail and scaring people away? I'll often post and get 200 views and zero responses.

    I also want to mention - my first post on the linked thread was NINE days ago. Chewitt made some great suggestions - things that, by the way, I didn't know how to do, but instead of asking, I figured out myself, as you can see from the screenshots on the thread.

    I have posted the question on the official Kodi forum, the LinuxQuestions (LQ) forum, the Shield TV forum and before ANY post I make, I try to learn more about what I'm doing and see if I can fix something on my own.

    Am I ready to solve the problem and be done with it? Yes! Have I actually been working on fixing this for about 20 days? Yes!

    Please don't suggest that I'm acting like a child when I ask for guidance on how to improve my posts.

    This is your second thread with a title taking passive-aggressive swings at the community for what you perceive is a lack of timely responses to your questions (Other time here.)

    I think you need to calm down a bit and exercise some patience. We've all been in the position of being frustrated with little nagging problems before (users and devs.) The fact is most of the time no one has an answer OR the one person on the planet who does hasn't come across your post yet OR the answer is complicated enough that the person needs to carve out a portion of their day to help you out.

    No one is intentionally ignoring you and your threads/posts seem to imply that.

    I understand your point as well.

    With regard to the older thread, it had been (I believe) 3 days since my first post, and I was concerned that it was simply buried. (Also, there was a note on the topic in the FAQ instructing to reference the wiki, which WAS a dead link.)

    Also, it was stated by Klojum that I was not exercising autodidacticism, yet I'm starting to think that you're right - I consider myself a noob, while in fact, the questions that I ask would involve a very limited number of people who actually know the answer to my questions because I HAVE researched like crazy before posting.

    I apologize for the tone of the posts involved - I always use a to-do list app, and when I've moved the same to-do item to the next day 6 times, and invested 30 hours into finding an answer that is likely a command or checkbox away, I simply get frustrated.

    I just didn't realize that my questions were out of the grasp of most as you stated.

    Yeah, I'll give that a try. Thanks.
    [hr]

    Quote from Jaaxx


    This is your second thread with a title taking passive-aggressive swings at the community for what you perceive is a lack of timely responses to your questions (Other time here.)

    I think you need to calm down a bit and exercise some patience. We've all been in the position of being frustrated with little nagging problems before (users and devs.) The fact is most of the time no one has an answer OR the one person on the planet who does hasn't come across your post yet OR the answer is complicated enough that the person needs to carve out a portion of their day to help you out.

    No one is intentionally ignoring you and your threads/posts seem to imply that.

    I wanted to add - as you know, I essentially explained earlier that I get nobody is intentionally ignoring my posts.

    But scenarios involving buried posts of course aren't unheard of. I found an interesting example of a cool and simple function that could be useful for any forum: