No Point To Discuss Same Query Again and Again

[Himanshu_Goyal]

Dear All Engineers,

before start any discussion do some homework and try to findout solution youself. If you have error code or something related to the issue search in search box and read some knowledge base or previous discussions. These efforts already done by all engineers can help you to resolve your issues.

No point to discuss same query again and again, put some effort to resolve the issue by yourself.

[jcarmody]

Another good thing is to know How To Ask Questions The Smart Way.

[altenbach]

Well, this post does not help at all. If new users cannot find a related discusssion, how can they ever find your post, read it in detail, completely understand it, and compose their first post perfectly??? 😮 Welcome to Utopia!

It is just not realistic to expect that everybody plays by some poorly defined narrow rule set. Many have never posted in a forum at all and it takes time to learn the proper behavior. Asking a technical question is very different from posting a status update on twitter or facebook and it takes expericence to do it right, exactly what they don't yet have.

The forum tries to encourage what you said by placing a soft barrier in the LabVIEW forum. You cannot post until you have made a related search. This itself is somewhat problematic, because you often see new questions tacked to the end of an already marked as solved 5 year old discussions that have nothing to do with each other, exept maybe sharing a keyword (for example "excel"). We also know that the search is at least partially broken. Many users end up here after clicking a result in a google search.

It is exciting (and a good sign for LabVIEW!) that there are new users in the forum every day. Our goal should be to get them more interested and not to turn them off with technicalities not related to their problem. It is OK to point to general posting mistakes, but only if you also try to try to help with a solution to the actual LabVIEW problem in the same post. One-liner replies such as "read the manual", "everybody knows that", "do a search" are not helpful at all, especially to somebody who struggled all night to get that shift register partially figured out or who is frustrated by some race condition!

The alternative would be a place where some old guys share the same old perfectly composed posts ad infinitum. That would be boring! Nobody wants that! 😄

[smercurio_fc]

I respectfully disagree with you altenbach. I think replies such as "read the manual" and "do a search" are more than appropriate. Some people don't want to be "bothered" with even turning on Context Help. How many times have you seen questions where the answer lied in the Context Help or the manual? Why enable lazy people? Of course, you can accuse me of passing judgement on these people without knowing all the facts. And you're probably right in some cases. However, I would contend that these days everybody seems to run to the internet before trying to make an effort on their own. Perhaps it's a generational thing. I remember when there was no internet and you couldn't simply post a question on a forum. You actually had to read.

EDIT: One clarification: This is not to say that "running to the internet" is a bad thing. The internet is a priceless source of information. However, when I'm trying to find an answer to something. I *always* spend time performing searches to see if the question has already been covered. Is it too much to ask someone else to do the same thing?

[altenbach]

We are way too familiar with LabVIEW, so everything seems easy and obvious. This is not true for a beginner. For a LabVIEW beginner it takes some time to even know that there is a context help, how to enable it, and how to use it. "hovering" is not an ingrained natural reaction, and (for example) does not even exist on touch panel driven user interfaces.

Instead of "use the context help", we could say "To use the context help, press ctrl+h, hover over the function of interest, and watch how that contect help window instantly follows to give you hints".

---

@smercurio_fc wrote:

I think replies such as "read the manual" and "do a search" are more than appropriate.

---

However, even these answer can be made more helpful. The student might not know the exact term for whatever they are trying to solve or the name of the function that does what they need.

A "three word answer" is not the answer. Adding only a few extra words can make a huge difference, and does not cost us anything because we are so efficient at searching and manual reading that we know exactly what to do 😄 Why not share it?

More targeted replies such as "read the manual on crosscorrelation", "do a web search on cluster analysis" or "do a forum search on 2D nonlinear fitting written by altenbach". are orders of magnitude more helpful. Once they do one search with some assistance and see how easy it is, they will do the next 100 queries on their own. 

True story:

After years of not even bothering installing my copy of matlab on my new computers (According to my account profile, my last activation was in 2008!), I yesterday broke down and installed it in order to look at some programs written by somebody else. Since the code was written for an older version, there were incompatibilities and I got error messages and nothing would run. Since I am completely unfamiliar with the programming environment, I had no idea where to start and what to do next. So what's better? Somebody giving me 2 minutes worth of hints, or me scrambling through the online help for hours, not really knowing what to look for. Or shoud I just give up? 😮

[smercurio_fc]

I hear what you are saying. However, your premise seems to be based on the assumption that we are talking to students (you keep referring to students in your post or make allusions to students). I don't know if that's because you primarily work in an academic background. Most of the people who frequent these forums aren't students. They're people whose job it is to work with LabVIEW. I would expect more from those whose job it is to work with programming languages such as LabVIEW. Yes, sometimes they get LabVIEW dumped on them, but they should know how to use manuals and how to look for answers.

I am not attempting to change your mind and you won't change my mind. I have my take on this, and I make an effort to help when I can. However, I take very little pity on those who obviously don't even bother to do the little effort on their part, and say so. In the end I am only human, and I can only hope that I do more good than "harm".

[SteveChandler]

If I am working on something that has a really hot deadline and I have a question, I can either spend a few hours or days doing the research or just ask someone who has already been there. Students really should do their own research but LabVIEW is used by professionals to get things done in the lab.

They might not be software engineers and bought the software simply to get measurements out of an instrument and into Excel. I think that a lot of times it is obvious if the person asking the question is a lazy student or a busy hardware engineer trying to get some work done with a several thousand dollar piece of software.

It can take years to become a good LabVIEW programmer especially if you have very little software background and a full time job as an electrical engineer. I don't mind helping these people because I have been there. It's nice to know that I can ask a question here and get an answer in a few minutes in many cases.

If someone is getting really frustrated with LabVIEW in their first three days of using it then clicks on the Discussion Forums under Online Support in the getting started window, creates an account and asks their first question only to be scolded for not reading the manual, that could only increase their frustration with the software. They will probably quit using it and tell everyone how much it sucks. If they get a quick response answering their question then they might tell everyone how LabVIEW saved their entire day.

[nyc_(is_out_of_here)]

---

@smercurio_fc wrote:

I hear what you are saying. However, your premise seems to be based on the assumption that we are talking to students (you keep referring to students in your post or make allusions to students). I don't know if that's because you primarily work in an academic background. Most of the people who frequent these forums aren't students. They're people whose job it is to work with LabVIEW. I would expect more from those whose job it is to work with programming languages such as LabVIEW. Yes, sometimes they get LabVIEW dumped on them, but they should know how to use manuals and how to look for answers.

I am not attempting to change your mind and you won't change my mind. I have my take on this, and I make an effort to help when I can. However, I take very little pity on those who obviously don't even bother to do the little effort on their part, and say so. In the end I am only human, and I can only hope that I do more good than "harm".

---

I think people are more impatient. They want an answer now. It is quite obvious in many of the questions being posted.

Also, with LabVIEW there is a lack of respect in some quarters with regards to its perceive ease of use.

I have encountered people who look down on LabVIEW because it isn't a traditional programming language, so therefore, it shouldn't require the effort that learning C or even BASIC should take. They think that this should be a "piece of cake" and then find that just as with any other tool, it takes effort and time. I get the impression that some people make less of an effort to learn LabVIEW because they were told that LabVIEW isn't really programming, etc. etc.