Remember that nobody gets paid for answering a FreeBSD question. They do it of their own free will. You can influence this free will positively by submitting a well-formulated question supplying as much relevant information as possible. You can influence this free will negatively by submitting an incomplete, illegible, or rude question. It is perfectly possible to send a message to FreeBSD-questions and not get an answer even if you follow these rules. It is much more possible to not get an answer if you do not. In the rest of this document, we will look at how to get the most out of your question to FreeBSD-questions.

Not everybody who answers FreeBSD questions reads every message: they look at the subject line and decide whether it interests them. Clearly, it is in your interest to specify a subject. “FreeBSD problem” or “Help” are not enough. If you provide no subject at all, many people will not bother reading it. If your subject is not specific enough, the people who can answer it may not read it.

Format your message so that it is legible, and PLEASE DO NOT SHOUT!!!!!. We appreciate that a lot of people do not speak English as their first language, and we try to make allowances for that, but it is really painful to try to read a message written full of typos or without any line breaks.

Do not underestimate the effect that a poorly formatted mail message has, not just on the FreeBSD-questions mailing list. Your mail message is all people see of you, and if it is poorly formatted, one line per paragraph, badly spelt, or full of errors, it will give people a poor impression of you.

A lot of badly formatted messages come from bad mailers or badly configured mailers. The following mailers are known to send out badly formatted messages without you finding out about them:

Try not to use MIME: a lot of people use mailers which do not get on very well with MIME.

Make sure your time and time zone are set correctly. This may seem a little silly, since your message still gets there, but many of the people you are trying to reach get several hundred messages a day. They frequently sort the incoming messages by subject and by date, and if your message does not come before the first answer, they may assume they missed it and not bother to look.

Do not include unrelated questions in the same message. Firstly, a long message tends to scare people off, and secondly, it is more difficult to get all the people who can answer all the questions to read the message.

Specify as much information as possible. This is a difficult area, and we need to expand on what information you need to submit, but here is a start:

A lot of the information you need to supply is the output of programs, such as dmesg(8), or console messages, which usually appear in /var/log/messages. Do not try to copy this information by typing it in again; it is a real pain, and you are bound to make a mistake. To send log file contents, either make a copy of the file and use an editor to trim the information to what is relevant, or cut and paste into your message. For the output of programs like dmesg(8), redirect the output to a file and include that. For example,

% dmesg > /tmp/dmesg.out

This redirects the information to the file /tmp/dmesg.out.

If you do all this, and you still do not get an answer, there could be other reasons. For example, the problem is so complicated that nobody knows the answer, or the person who does know the answer was offline. If you do not get an answer after, say, a week, it might help to re-send the message. If you do not get an answer to your second message, though, you are probably not going to get one from this forum. Resending the same message again and again will only make you unpopular.