[volunteers] Please help

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Vasudevan Kottilil (vasudevank2 at gmail.com):

> Recently (1-2 months) I bought a new laptop from system76 (model - Gazelle,
> 16G memory, 500G disk) and suspect there may be h/w issues. Any
> suggestions/pointers are welcome.

Hi, Vasu.

1.  I recommend you post that to the main mailing list,
svlug at lists.svlug.org.  The purpose of this mailing list is SVLUG 
administration.  Also, it has a _much_ smaller membership.

2.  Please strongly consider a more-descriptive Subject header than 
'Please help'.

http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#bespecific

  Use meaningful, specific subject headers

  On mailing lists, newsgroups or Web forums, the subject header is your
  golden opportunity to attract qualified experts' attention in around 50
  characters or fewer. Don't waste it on babble like "Please help
  me" (let alone "PLEASE HELP ME!!!!" messages with subjects
  like that get discarded by reflex). Don't try to impress us with the
  depth of your anguish; use the space for a super-concise problem
  description instead.

  One good convention for subject headers, used by many tech support
  organizations, is "object - deviation". The "object" part specifies 
  what thing or group of things is having a problem, and the "deviation" 
  part describes the deviation from expected behavior.

  Stupid:

      HELP! Video doesn't work properly on my laptop!

  Smart:

      X.org 6.8.1 misshapen mouse cursor, Fooware MV1005 vid. chipset

  Smarter:

      X.org 6.8.1 mouse cursor on Fooware MV1005 vid. chipset - is
      misshapen
  [...]


I'm not necesarily recommending 'object - deviation', but I'm just
saying you can and should write something a whole lot more descriptive
than 'Please help'.  It's in _your_ interest to do so, because it'll 
make it much more likely someone will take an interest.