Before You Ask
Before you post a topic to ask a question in Taleworlds forum, please make sure you do the following:
- Try to search for the answer in the Taleworlds forum.
- Try to find an answer by searching the Web.
- Try to find an answer by reading the manual.
- Try to find an answer by reading an FAQ.
- Try to find an answer by inspection or experimentation.
- Try to find an answer by asking a skilled friend.
- If you're a modder, try to find an answer by reading the source code.
When you ask your question, display the fact that you have done these things first; this will help establish that you're not being a lazy sponge and wasting people's time. Better yet, display what you have learned from doing these things. We like answering questions for people who have demonstrated they can learn from the answers.
Good Question and Bad Question
There is two kinds of ways to ask a question. Smart or fool.
On Taleworlds forum, the subject header is your golden opportunity to attract qualified experts' attention in around 50 characters or fewer.
Stupid: HELP! GAME CRASH!
Smart: Warband 1.173 GPU driver crash, RTX2080Ti graphics card
Smarter: Running Warband 1.173 GPU driver crash on the RTX2080Ti graphics card - Driver Crash
How To Answer Questions in a Helpful Way
Be gentle. Problem-related stress can make people seem rude or stupid even when they're not.
Reply to a first offender off-line. There is no need for public humiliation for someone who may have made an honest mistake. A real newbie may not know how to search for archives or where the FAQ is stored or posted.
If you don't know for sure, say so! A wrong but authoritative-sounding answer is worse than none at all. Don't point anyone down a wrong path simply because it's fun to sound like an expert. Be humble and honest; set a good example for both the querent and your peers.
If you can't help, don't hinder it. Don't make jokes about procedures that could trash the user's setup — the poor sap might interpret these as instructions.
Ask probing questions to elicit more details. If you're good at this, the querent will learn something — and so might you. Try to turn the bad question into a good one; remember we were all newbies once.
While muttering RTFM is sometimes justified when replying to someone who is just a lazy slob, a pointer to documentation (even if it's just a suggestion to google for a key phrase) is better.
If you're going to answer the question at all, give good value. Don't suggest kludgy workarounds when somebody is using the wrong tool or approach. Suggest good tools. Reframe the question.
Answer the actual question! If the querent has been so thorough as to do his or her research and has included in the query that X, Y, Z, A, B, and C have already been tried without good result, it is supremely unhelpful to respond with “Try A or B,” or with a link to something that only says, “Try X, Y, Z, A, B, or C.”.
Help your community learn from the question. When you field a good question, ask yourself “How would the relevant documentation or FAQ have to change so that nobody has to answer this again?” Then send a patch to the document maintainer.
If you did research to answer the question, demonstrate your skills rather than writing as though you pulled the answer out of your butt. Answering one good question is like feeding a hungry person one meal, but teaching them research skills by example is showing them how to grow food for a lifetime.
How to search for an answer in the Taleworlds forum?
Try to search for the answer in the Taleworlds forum.
You could easily find the search function on the right top. Please remember speaking English when you try to find an answer. If you are a member who lives in China mainland, so Google is not available for you. I suggest you would need help with a VPN.
If you don't know how to ask a question in an Asian language, please feel free to contact
Alixyang and
Shiroin.
