Posting Advice - Especially for Students

[Gitahi Ng'ang'a]

I would like to offer some unsolicited advice especially to the students participating on this forum.

The OpenMRS Kenya community is happy to accommodate as many resourceful members as possible, so your presence here is more than welcome.

However, you might have noticed that there are quite a number of posts that receive zero or very weak responses. There could be many reasons for that, but one that you can do something about is the quality of your post.

Most internet forums have some basic rules and you can easily find examples on the internet. They tend to say the same things mostly so any you find will be helpful. If anyone has a link to some rules for OpenMRS forums please share it.

Generally though, start by making sure your post is clear. You can run it by a friend if necessary. Also make sure it shows some effort on your part. Desist from asking something that would probably have been answered in the first link if you cared to Google it up. People want to help, but they also want to spend their time wisely.

PS: If you are a boot camp student, you earn points for posting sensibly and you lose points for posting thoughtlessly. :-)

Kazi kwenu!

[Wesley Brown]

Very good post Gitahi, I totally agree with everything you are saying here! Let me just add that I rarely answer any questions that are not specific. A post that simply says that OpenMRS won't start up but do not include error messages or explain what appears to be broken is not a good question/request for help. A question like this indicates that the poster has not even taken the first steps towards resolving the issue on their own and will likely just want someone to fix it for them rather than wanting to learn how to fix it themselves.

Also, I'll add that in general, asking good questions and writing in a coherent, grammatically-correct manner can help considerably when looking for employment.

-Wes

[Mike Aono]

Thanks Gitahi for this one. I suggest that we maybe have some standards that people could see and read to train themselves, or rather guide them on how to ask questions in order to make their questions relevant, just before they ask the questions. Please see in the link http://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask , we can borrow some stuff from stackoverflow, how they want their questions asked. I think it will be a good start up.

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Regards,

Mike Aono

[Gitahi Ng'ang'a]

Thanks for underscoring the importance of "forum etiquette".

Wes makes an especially important point. Let's not expect people to guess where our sentences and paragraphs begin and end. The few extra keystrokes to capitalize your letters and punctuate your sentences are well worth the effort.

Mike, that's an excellent link. I think it gives everyone a good idea of what a good forum post should look like. There are plenty more online so I would vote for people familiarizing themselves with such, instead of us investing time to write up something for this particular mailing list.