Rant About Online Forums: Help, Don't Criticize

Online forums are very helpful.  They can also be very frustrating.  Technology is filled with people that have strong opinions about technology and enjoy trolling.  I find it frustrating when I look for help on a topic, but all I get is "my way is better, so I'm not going to help you."

I recently wrote about problems with ZFS when upgrading Ubuntu to 14.04.  Technically, the problem was around the 3.12 kernel upgrade.  When searching for answers, I came across lots of people that were anti-ZFS.  If someone is anti-ZFS, then why would they answer a ZFS related question?  Because they are trolls.

The most frequent answer I saw to this question was usually something about how you shouldn't use ZFS.  They would start a discussion about the cons of ZFS.  These types of answers don't help.  They don't provide anything constructive.  They just frustrate.  If I need help with a technology, I need people who are familiar with that technology.  I don't need to justify WHY I used a technology before I get that help.

A similar thing happened when I was researching DTLS.  DTLS is an encryption standard for UDP packets.  If you need to send data to someone over UDP, then DTLS is the way that you would encrypt it....in theory.  The problem is DTLS isn't very well supported.  I wanted to write an Android app that uses DTLS, but the OpenSSL version that comes with Android doesn't have DTLS enabled.  Some people were helpful and pointed out that I could compile OpenSSL myself.  I was trying to avoid that, but at least they were trying to be helpful.

Others were not so helpful.  They would argue that DTLS is useless because UDP is useless.  They argued that I should just use TCP.  They argue that there is no reason to use UDP, even though they know nothing about what I am trying to do.  Once again, you end up having to defend rather than getting help.  In this particular case, I was trying to avoid the TCP over TCP meltdown problem.

I remember running into this many times in the past.  Something that people need to keep in mind is that the harder the problem, the more help someone is going to need.  You shouldn't claim to be the expert then argue about the why.