November 27, 2007 at 11:03 am
Jeff, many thanks for that article. I've seen so many people shoot themselves in the foot, exactly as you describe. Gee, I MAY have done it myself...
As was mentioned, the people who author posts like "It's broken", or "Help!!!" seem to communicate that way face-to-face, too. You have to DRAG the information out of them in order to help, and that gets very tiring.
Regards,
Joe
November 27, 2007 at 11:03 am
One question I have, that I haven't been able to figure out... how do you post your code in the little blue box? When I copy and paste right from Management Studio, all the formatting is stripped. I'm sure it's easy, will you give me the tip?
Thanks for the article, I'm going to make sure I get it out to colleagues as well. I wish I would have known this sooner, but it becomes clear when you start to read others' posts.
Todd Carrier
MCITP - Database Administrator (SQL 2008)
MCSE: Data Platform (SQL 2012)
November 27, 2007 at 11:03 am
Actually, more than read the article, take it to heart and follow its example! You know what they say about leading a horse to water...
😎
November 27, 2007 at 11:05 am
Opus (11/27/2007)
As someone who generally posts more questions than answers, I thought this was a great article. Any way to make this required reading before someone creates their first post? This would have saved me a lot of time and those answering my questions, as you stated. Nicely done.
Very happy to have helped. You, Marie, and the other Jeffrey are precisely the audience I was trying to target. Thanks so much for taking the time to respond.
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
November 27, 2007 at 11:07 am
Todd Carrier (11/27/2007)
One question I have, that I haven't been able to figure out... how do you post your code in the little blue box? When I copy and paste right from Management Studio, all the formatting is stripped. I'm sure it's easy, will you give me the tip?Thanks for the article, I'm going to make sure I get it out to colleagues as well. I wish I would have known this sooner, but it becomes clear when you start to read others' posts.
place the IFCode Shortcuts that appear to the left of the posting text box. REMOVE the Periods from
[.code.]
your code here
[./code.]
to get
your code here
______________________________________________________________________
Personal Motto: Why push the envelope when you can just open it?
If you follow the direction given HERE[/url] you'll likely increase the number and quality of responses you get to your question.
Jason L. SelburgNovember 27, 2007 at 11:08 am
Lynn Pettis (11/27/2007)
Actually, more than read the article, take it to heart and follow its example! You know what they say about leading a horse to water...😎
....You're lucky if he doesn't Pee in it? :hehe:
______________________________________________________________________
Personal Motto: Why push the envelope when you can just open it?
If you follow the direction given HERE[/url] you'll likely increase the number and quality of responses you get to your question.
Jason L. SelburgNovember 27, 2007 at 11:12 am
We could put a posting guide, though I'm not sure many people will read it.
I think I'll re-run this once a month or so to keep it active in the eyes of new users. We add so many people every month, having this pop-up regularly would probably be a great help.
November 27, 2007 at 11:19 am
Wow! So many great comments and ideas... I can't keep up with all the posts! Thank you all for taking the time out of your busy day to post a comment and suggestions.
For those looking for how to post code in the "little blue window"... there's two ways...
One is to click on the "IFCode" thingy in the menu of the edit window and find the "CODE" entry under description... then just click on the "code" in the example column. It'll place the necessary bracketed commands in the edit window... paste your code between those two commands. The other way is manually type the two commands (can't really type them here for an example because they'd make a code window).
I'm putting a wish-list together for Steve and Tony to see if we can make the process a bit more simple.
The other thing is that when you try to copy from one of those code windows, you have to start your cursor a line above the code window and then click and drag to a line below the code window. That will preserve all the spaces but the code still comes out on a single line... that's because they used a Vertical Tab instead of either a CR or LF character. The workaround for that is to paste into WORD and replace ^l with ^p (lower case "L" and "P", respectively, preceded by a cirumflex) and all "space" and end-of-line formatting will be preserved.
I'll try to answer each post but, like I said, there are so many... please don't be offended if I miss a response...
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
November 27, 2007 at 11:25 am
Steve Jones - Editor (11/27/2007)
We could put a posting guide, though I'm not sure many people will read it.I think I'll re-run this once a month or so to keep it active in the eyes of new users. We add so many people every month, having this pop-up regularly would probably be a great help.
Awesome... thanks, Steve!
Is there a way you could repair the "bad code" example in the article? Maybe just move it out of the code window? Thanks!
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
November 27, 2007 at 11:27 am
Jason Selburg (11/27/2007)
Lynn Pettis (11/27/2007)
Actually, more than read the article, take it to heart and follow its example! You know what they say about leading a horse to water...😎
....You're lucky if he doesn't Pee in it? :hehe:
No... not that one... (cleaned up version :hehe: ) the one about "You can lead a horse to water... and you can make him drink if you can draw a vacuum... but you don't want to use your mouth on that end." 😛
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
November 27, 2007 at 11:36 am
Jeff Moden (11/27/2007)
Jason Selburg (11/27/2007)
Lynn Pettis (11/27/2007)
Actually, more than read the article, take it to heart and follow its example! You know what they say about leading a horse to water...😎
....You're lucky if he doesn't Pee in it? :hehe:
No... not that one... (cleaned up version :hehe: ) the one about "You can lead a horse to water... and you can make him drink if you can draw a vacuum... but you don't want to use your mouth on that end." 😛
Now that's wrong on so many levels (bad picture, out of my mind!).
November 27, 2007 at 2:17 pm
Jeff Moden (11/27/2007)
Doug Wittich (11/27/2007)
My pet peeve besides those given already: Poor choice of subject. So many "Newbie needs help" and "help me" threads abound. I'd much rather see a topical subject.Spot on, Doug, a doubly appreciated (but I had to get that one out of my system 😀 )... I've got 3 more articles in the works (2 accepted but not scheduled and one 2-parter in the process of being written) that cover more topical topics like...
True - but long titles seem to get permanently whacked. One of our more prolific generator of "generic questions" also has a bad habit of using very long titles, which aren't repeated anywhere, so half the question gets "swallowed"...
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part...unless you're my manager...or a director and above...or a really loud-spoken end-user..All right - what was my emergency again?
November 27, 2007 at 2:22 pm
Larry Huisingh (11/27/2007)
Maybe you could comment on how to set off the code snippets with formatting like you used that allows scrolling. I haven't posted code on this forum before and am unfamiliar with the IFCode stuff.Thanks.
Larry - if you simply enclose your formatted code in square-bracketted code tags (meaning - replace the curly brackets below with square brackets) - you will get what you're asking for
{code}
your code will appear here
{/code}
you would get
your code will appear here
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part...unless you're my manager...or a director and above...or a really loud-spoken end-user..All right - what was my emergency again?
November 27, 2007 at 3:22 pm
Great article Jeff! I agree in that I've read sooo many posts that were so badly presented that I simply move on to another. I read/answer posts while at work when I have a chance because I'm waiting on a query to run or waiting in general and I simply don't have time to get their test data prepared for them. The 'help me help you' attitude is key in getting a post answered with a quality answer.
Also, this is very important with the language barrier that we often run into here on SSC. T-SQL is the common, universal language that all of us SQL Server guys (should) speak so a well presented problem including expected results takes alot of the guess work and communication problems out of the picture.
Again, great article.
November 27, 2007 at 4:42 pm
Thanks for the feedback, John! Yeah, same thing here... sometimes the language barrier is a bit difficult to get through, but a well formed Create Table statement cut's through a huge amount of that...
... now, if there's not too much of a language barrier for folks to get through the article, we'll be all set! And thanks for the compliment!
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
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