Getting along in the Python community [LWN.net]

Getting along in the Python community

Posted Jun 25, 2018 9:58 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: Getting along in the Python community by marcH
Parent article: Getting along in the Python community

It depends very, very strongly on the quality of your canned answer, though.

If your canned answer boils down to "RTFM or GTFO. Docs at https://example.org/docs", then you're going to have a bad experience as a recipient. If your canned answer boils down to "https://example.org/docs/reporting-a-bug has details of the information we need to handle a bug quickly; please get us that information so that we can help you", then the recipient is likely to have a better experience.

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Getting along in the Python community

Posted Jun 25, 2018 15:42 UTC (Mon) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (1 responses)

I found that merely sending a link without any F-word works fine.

Not sure what you mean by "quality"; IMHO as long as your emotion level is low when you write the answer and you pay a fair amount of attention to your choice of words then the length of the answer will - contrary to a common misconception - not make any difference to the recipient's emotions.

Long story short I guess all I'm saying is: in _some cases_ using email for instant messaging is the best option.

In an ideal world people would use IRC or some other instant messaging tool for instant messaging, however neither the world nor IRC are perfect. Of course you could make your one-line answer a two-lines answer by adding a link to IRC :-)

Getting along in the Python community

Posted Jun 25, 2018 15:48 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

It then depends on the quality of your link - if it's a good link with lots of help, then the fact that it's a canned response is a non-issue. If the link basically says (politely or otherwise) "go away, I don't care about you", then it's going to upset people.

E.g. linking people whose e-mail matches your "bug report" filter to something like Mercurial's BugTracker wiki page isn't offensive - there's a lot of information in there on how to get attention, and how to get helpful responses.