Similar to how we have etiquette when interacting with each other in person, there is also etiquette for interactions online as well. To efficiently gain answers to your questions, one must ask “smart” questions. As mentioned by Eric Steven Raymond and Rick Moen, there are things you can do before attempting to ask your question and efficient ways to go about asking your question. Before asking a question, you can attempt to find the answer by searching the forums, web, manual, FAQ, experiments, source code or asking a skilled friend to help. When those actions do not lead you to your answer then you will have to use an efficient way to ask questions. Such ways are to choose a related forum, ask technical questions, and not asking homework questions. The following link is a good example of a “smart question”
This question is very descriptive of the problem. It seems to be a very unique question as there are not questions similar to it. The symptoms of the problem are discussed and it does not seem to be a question answered by the manual as well. The question is also concise and to the point. Snippets of the code is pasted rather than the whole code.
The following link is a bad example of a “smart question”
This question is a bad example because it clearly can be answered by a simple web search or looking into a textbook. The answers even link websites that answer the question. Such question is a case that should have “STFW” as an answer. The person was definitely too lazy to make the same effort to type out their question in the search engine than the forum site. This question fails to be a question that is required to have someone of more expertise to solve. Anyone could have made a simple search in a search engine to find the answer.