How Not to Ask a Question

I received this email last week. I often get random email from people I don’t know asking for help with Perl problems and I’m happy to help whenever I can (although I always point our that Perl Monks is going to get better answers in less time).

But if you’re going to ask random strangers for help, you should probably make a bit more effort than this person did. I’ve reformatted it and corrected the English.

Hello sir,

I am new developer in perl scripting language using MVC Frame works, my doubt is how to write below query in MVC.

the above query how to write in mvc frameork can we please help me sir,

Thanks and Regards

How would you reply to mail like that?

Update: I asked which MVC framework he was using. He replied:

I am using CGI::Carp ‘fatalsToBrowser’ with linux shell.

At that point I gave up.

4 thoughts on “How Not to Ask a Question

  1. I sometimes feel like that with the framework I’m currently using: my knowledge of the underlying concepts is so poor that I can’t even form coherent questions πŸ™

  2. I bet, with enough comedy callbacks, you could use CGI::Carp as an MVC framework, but the resulting code would look really weird. Even for perl :-).

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