Firebird owes its existence to the community’s support lists. Though it’s all ancient history now, if it hadn’t been for the esprit de corps among the “regulars” of the old InterBase support list hosted by mers.com in the ‘nineties, Borland’s shock-horror decisionto kill off InterBase development at the end of 1999 would have been the end of it, for the English-speaking users at least

Firebird’s support lists on Yahoo and Sourceforge were born out of the same cataclysm of fatal fire and regeneration that caused the phoenix, drawn from the fire against extreme adversity, to take flight as Firebird in July 2000. Existing and new users, both of Firebird and of the the rich selection of drivers and tools that spun off from and for it, depend heavily on the lists to get up to speed with the evolution of all of these software products.

Newbies often observe that there is just nothing like our lists for any other software, be it open source or not. One of the things that I think makes the Firebird lists stand out from the crowd is that, once gripped by the power of the software, our users never leave the lists. Instead, they stick around, learn hard and stay ready and willing to impart to others what they have learnt. After nearly six years of this, across a dozen lists, our concentrated mix of expertise and fidelity is hard to beat.

Now, doesn’t all this make us all feel warm and fuzzy? For those of us in the hot core of this voluntary support infrastructure, the answer has to be, unfortunately, “Not all the time!” There are some bugbears that can make the most patient person see red. I’m using this column to draw attention to some of the worst.

First and worst is silly questions. You have all seen them. Perhaps you even posted them! “Subject: Help! Body: Every time I try to connect to Firebird I get the message ‘Connection refused’. What am I doing wrong?” What follows from that is a frustrating and tedious game for responders. “What version of Firebird are you using? Which server model? Which platform? Which tool? What connection path? (’By connection path, we mean….’)..”

Everyone’s time is valuable. Nobody has the luxury of being able to sit around all day playing this game. If we weren’t willing to help, we wouldn’t be there. But you make it hard, or even impossible, when you post problems with no descriptions. You waste our time. You waste your time. We get frustrated because you don’t provide the facts; you get frustrated because we can’t read your mind. And the list gets filled with noise.

If there’s something I’ve learnt in more than 12 years of on-line software support, it is that a problem well described is a problem solved. If a person applies time and thought to presenting a good description of the problem, chances are the solution will hop up and punch him on the nose. Even if it doesn’t, good descriptions produce the fastest right answers from list contributors. Furthermore, those good descriptions and their solutions form a powerful resource in the archives, for others coming along behind.

Off-topic questions are another source of noise and irritation in the lists. At the Firebird website, we have bent over backwards to make it very clear which lists are appropriate for which areas of interest. An off-topic posting is easily forgiven if the poster politely complies with a request from a list regular to move the question to “x” list. When these events instead become flame threads, or when the same people persistently reoffend, they are an extreme burden on everyone

In the “highly tedious” category we have the kind of question that goes like this: “Subject: Bug in Firebird SQL. Body: “This statement works in MSSQL/Access/MySQL/insert any non-standard DBMS name here. It doesn’t work in Firebird. Where should I report this bug?” To be fair, George Bernard Shaw wasn’t totally right when he said “Ignorance is a sin.” However, you do at least owe it to yourself to know what you are talking about, and not to present your problem as an attack on our software. Whether intended or not, it comes over as a troll and you come across as a fool. There’s a strong chance that your attitude will discourage anyone from bothering with you at all. It’s no-win, sure, but it’s also a reflection of human nature. You reap what you sow

In closing this little tirade, I just want to say that I hope I’ve struck a chord with those of our readership who struggle to get satisfaction from their list postings. It will be a rare question indeed that has no answer. Those rareties, well-presented, become excellent bug reports. If you’re not getting an answer, there’s a high chance that you asked a silly question.

Helen E. M. Borrie