There are already plenty of great guides on how to ask good questions. We especially like How To Ask Questions The Smart Way & Stackoverflow's How do I ask a good question? What follows is a condensed summary from those articles tailored for interactions in the linkerd community slack.

Linkerd community members will ignore poorly constructed questions. It's not because we want to be mean, but because we have limited time to devote to open source. Instead, we focus on high quality questions, answers, and discussions that are invaluable to the community. We hope you will add value to the community too by writing thoughtful questions and by answering the questions of others.

Treat members' time with respect. The linkerd slack community members are there of their own volition, no one is paying them to answer questions. Appreciate that they are giving their time as a gift to you, in hopes that you in turn can help other newer users on the channel and grow our community.

Describe what you've already tried, or where you have already searched for an answer. Did you:

• check the linkerd1 or linkerd2 in-depth sections?
• check the Linkerd Support Forum from Buoyant?
• check the linkerd1 or linker2 config documentation?
• google it?

Attempting a few things and then recounting them to the channel achieves a number of good things. First, it bolsters your ability to help yourself and not give up on yourself too early. You are more capable than you think. Second, it shows folks in slack that you are willing to work and contribute in good faith. Third, it stops helpful folks from hitting dead ends you've already been to. And fourth, it improves your knowledge and elevates the community discussion.

Find the smallest possible reproducible example of the problem. Avoid dumping hundreds of lines of config into the slack and waiting for someone to point out the error. Linkerd lives at the intersection of a whole mess of complex devops technologies. When linkerd surfaces an issue, it's very likely a problem with the setup rather than with linkerd directly. So before reporting an issue, try to reproduce the issue again with fewer replicas, locally, outside of docker, or any other way you can think of to reduce the example's complexity.

If you're in kubernetes, what cloud provider are you using? If in mesos, is it DC/OS? Are you using marathon? This type of environment context is essential. Include linkerd version and any relevant configs, logs, error messages or metrics.

Please post configs, logs, or code as a thread off the original message. This helps keeps the slack channel organized as we continue to grow.