up vote 20 down vote favorite

I've just asked two consecutive questions. While I've tried to keep them succinct and as useful to other people as possible, it occurs to me that it may be bad form to ask too many questions in a short period. What is best practice here?

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@lockstep Ah yes, xport :-) – Joseph Wright♦ Dec 6 '12 at 16:33

2 Answers

up vote 27 down vote accepted

A good practice is to avoid flooding the front page. Besides that, time doesn't matter much - however if you put effort in writing a good question, and in investigating if it was already asked or not, the time period would probably not very short. Avoiding duplicates is an art which costs time, both the OP and potential answerers.

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+1; "putting effort in writing a good question", more specifically, usually means providing a MWE. The more questions you ask, the better (i.e. more minimal) these MWEs should be, just to keep people from thinking you haven't tried. If every question you ask is a problem other users might come across as well (which basically means not being too localized), we're happy if you augment our corpus of knowledge this way. Even if you figured out a solution to an interesting problem yourself already, it even is encouraged to share your findings, see meta.tex.stackexchange.com/q/4/4012. – doncherry Dec 6 '12 at 18:43
up vote 11 down vote

Being relatively new to the TeX.SX I have been impressed by the constructive and positive atmosphere. This reply is perhaps not directly a response to the first question but more of an extension to the discussion. I totally agree that any new question should have been preceded by some research on this site and others before being posed. Another aspect is that a site like this has a task to fulfill also for persons new to LaTeX and who may ask fairly simple questions but lack the background to understand what tags to search for. I have seen other forums go from being fairly open to extremely elitistic since the forum and the senior users content and knowledge, respectively, develop in tandem. This is really sad indeed. Anyway, this means I think the way questions should be viewed is quite complex and one must keep the greater good in view when looking at questions and judging them. I hope to be part of TeX.SX for a long time and see posts that teaches me new things and also being able to provide answers or comment questions wherever I might be able (so far perhaps not much!)

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TeX.SX has been around for quite a bit now and fortunately I see no signs that we are becoming more elitist. We have a wide range of user skills and relatively little competitiveness among answerers: people tend to help improve others' answers with comments rather than post an almost identical competing answers. We do try to close duplicate questions where possible, which ideally saves everyone some time. So welcome, and I hope we continue to maintain the right combination of content and collegiality. – Alan Munn Dec 7 '12 at 16:48
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@AlanMunn but I do think some questions are closed too quickly and for the wrong reasons. This is a good example: tex.stackexchange.com/q/86202/14 . New user, question closed unfairly in my opinion. – Vivi Dec 10 '12 at 6:04
@vivi See comment in chat. – Alan Munn Dec 10 '12 at 6:15

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