It’s not infrequent that I see somebody ask a question that can be answered in only one way. But if that’s not the answer, then nobody will respond.<\/p>\n
Is there a module that does XYZ? <\/p><\/blockquote>\n
This question can be answered in only one way: “Yes, here it is.” If nobody has written such a module, nobody is going to reply saying, “No, nobody has written the module you request,” because that would require the responder to prove a negative. <\/p>\n
“I have scoured the entire planet, including code sitting on a hard drive in somebody’s mother’s basement, and have verified that there is no module that does XYZ. Furthermore, I have altered the rules of the universe to ensure that nobody will write such a module in the time between I completed this investigation and the time you receive this message.” <\/p>\n
If you ask a question asking whether something exists, there’s only one possible response, because nobody is going to say that the code you request has never been written. <\/p>\n
So far, nothing is wrong. Perhaps the person who asked the question was about to write an XYZ module, but wanted to make sure the effort was not being duplicated. <\/p>\n
However, there are some people who fail to realize that they just asked for proof of a negative, and send a follow-up: <\/p>\n
Resending. Can somebody please tell me whether this module exists? <\/p><\/blockquote>\n
What’s particularly scary are the people who ask the question in such a way that they are not only asking for proof of a negative, but in fact proof of a perpetual<\/i> negative. There was one customer who was rather insistent upon receiving an answer to a question of the form “Will there ever be a tool that will…?” <\/p>\n
And once again, the round-up of unhelpful or rude subject lines I’ve seen in the past five months: <\/p>\n
\n
- Please help <\/li>\n
- Some help please? <\/li>\n
- some help please? [lowercase this time] <\/li>\n
- KB980665 – customer issue! <\/li>\n
- I need urgent help <\/li>\n
- Windows Vista SP1 <\/li>\n
- SP1? <\/li>\n
- Need help — SRS299792458 <\/li>\n
- a problem <\/li>\n
- Possible Bug [capital letters make it sound Important] <\/li>\n
- Hi <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s not infrequent that I see somebody ask a question that can be answered in only one way. But if that’s not the answer, then nobody will respond. Is there a module that does XYZ? This question can be answered in only one way: “Yes, here it is.” If nobody has written such a module, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[130,103],"class_list":["post-20193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-email","tag-non-computer"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"
It’s not infrequent that I see somebody ask a question that can be answered in only one way. But if that’s not the answer, then nobody will respond. Is there a module that does XYZ? This question can be answered in only one way: “Yes, here it is.” If nobody has written such a module, […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20193"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20193\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}