The internet is an amazing resource that has saved the skin of my computer scientists in allowing them to connect with each other and having the whole world to collaborate with. With a power and resource this great it often goes abused. There are many forums and places on the internet to get help with homework assignments, problems at work, etc… and when you post questions and contribute to the forum it’s important to go into it with the right mindset. A good mindset to have when participating in the forums is that you are there to learn and contribute to that community. A bad mentality when using these resources is the mindset of just getting answers for free and not contributing in anyway. Essentially you are going for a give and take relationship between poster and answerer whichever one you may be instead of take and take trying to just get an answer as easily and fast as possible without growing and understanding. Having good question etiquette on forums is important because it will make the programmer want to help answer your question and will make the whole interaction more efficient and impactive. When asking a question on a forum you want to make it as crystal clear as possible what your issue is without any extra filler. Giving examples of your code or linking a repo of your code if it is too large is very helpful. Try to be specific with your questions to show that you have done research and have put a decent amount of solo effort into solving the problem. All these things will make for a good question that will incline people to help you. Then there is the lazy way to ask questions which is just asking for answers or putting a bunch of filler for the programmer to sift through. If you give a broad problem and don’t explain it well that puts a lot of the work on the answerers end and is going to cause other users to get exhausted of you.
Browsing through stackoverflow I have found one good example of forum posting and a not so great one(links below). The first post which is a highly upvoted question on the forum is “Change an HTML5 input’s placeholder color with CSS“ is a great example because it gets straight to the point on what their problem is and gives examples to go with it. They don’t explain the whole project their working on and complain. The post just very efficiently and cleanly presents a specific problem with sample code. Very simple post but great example of good etiquette when asking for help. A bad post that I found had many downvotes and was titled “How to send 100,000 emails weekly?”. This question is very broad and is asking for a full guide to solve their problem. The asker does not present any signs of effort or understanding for their question and is trying to have someone solve the whole scope of their problem without first looking into it themselves. Nobody wants to answer posts like this which is why it was closed by the forums and has a good amount of downvotes. Overall you want your question to be as efficient, clear, and thought provoking as possible creating a better experience on both ends in the forum.
Bad: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3905734/how-to-send-100-000-emails-weekly Good: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2610497/change-an-html5-inputs-placeholder-color-with-cs