A Brief Description of the Zephyr Class (and Instance) Help at MIT
What It Is (and is not)
----------
Class help is a place on MIT Zephyr where you can ask questions about
practically any topic, although computer-related topics are the most
frequent.
Class help is not an official service. It is not staffed by paid
employees--at least, not employees who are paid to read it. Most of
the people who will see your question do not have any official
privileges on MIT's services (like the ability to change passwords or
create mailing lists), although a few of them might by coincidence.
This arrangement has its ups and downs. On the negative side, if
nobody knows the answer to your question or feels like answering it,
you generally won't get any acknowledgement at all, and you won't know
whether nobody was paying attention or if people just don't know the
answer. Also, there is no culture of "the person asking is always
right"; if you ask questions in ways that people find annoying, or ask
how to do something people find offensive, you may receive strongly
worded replies.
On the positive side, there are a wide variety of very knowledgeable
people who read class help, sometimes at odd hours of the night. It
is one of the few forums where you can ask a question about any topic
(plumbers, airline tickets, Calvinist theology).
Instance help is just like class help, except that there are no
separate instances to thread conversations. We have both for
historical reasons; instance help existed for a long time before class
help formed, and it's what a lot of people still know about. If you
want to ask questions on instance help instead of class help, go
ahead. If you want to answer questions, you are encouraged to
subscribe to both.
If you're confused about the terms "class" and "instance" or about
Zephyr in general, you can read about Zephyr at:
http://www.mit.edu/afs/sipb/project/doc/izephyr/html/izephyr.html
Conventions
-----------
Make sure to subscribe to class help before asking a question (see
below to find out how). People won't generally want to respond to you
personally, although some are willing to.
If you're using class help (as opposed to instance help), pick an
"instance" to describe the category of your question. This will allow
people to follow the conversation about your question. The instance
should ideally be short and easy to type; "unix" is better than
"text-manipulation-commands," even though the latter is more specific.
Specificity is good too, of course; "linux" is better than "computers"
for a Linux installation problem. All that said, nobody is likely to
complain about your choice of instance, so don't worry about it too
much. If you are answering a question, use the same instance as the
question was asked on.
Try to be clear about your question. If you're asking about an error
message you saw, try to include the exact text of the message. It's
common for people to ask, "What are you really trying to do?" in order
to be able to better answer your question, so if you are asking how to
do something involved it is often helpful to include a general
description of what you're trying to accomplish.
If you find yourself asking a lot of questions on class help, you are
encouraged to hang out there and answer questions when you can, but
it's by no means a requirement.
If you have a comment to make about a question which isn't part of
answering it, take your comment to class help.d; see below for more
about that.
How to Use
----------
If you are on Athena, then the commands to use class help are:
To subscribe to class help permanently: zctl add help \* \*
To unsubscribe if you did the above: zctl del help \* \*
To subscribe for just this session: zctl sub help \* \*
To unsubscribe if you did the above: zctl unsub help \* \*
To ask or answer a question: zwrite -c help -i topic
If you prefer to use instance help, or want to subscribe there to
answer questions, the commands are:
To subscribe to instance help permanently: zctl add message help \*
To unsubscribe if you did the above: zctl del message help \*
To subscribe for just this session: zctl sub message help \*
To unsubscribe if you did the above: zctl unsub message help \*
To ask or answer a question: zwrite -i help
Class help.d
------------
Questions often lead to conversations (or occasionally snide comments)
which are not very helpful to the person asking. To insulate askers
and busy answerers from chatter, you should send tangential comments
to class help.d. Use the same instance as was being used on -c help.
Sometimes you will see people send messages to -c help -i topic.d
instead of -c help.d -i topic. This approach doesn't insulate -c help
subscribers from chatter, but people still occasionally do it.
For chatter arising from instance help, use instance help.d.
The Athena commands for class and instance help.d are:
To subscribe to class help.d permanently: zctl add help.d \* \*
To unsubscribe if you did the above: zctl del help.d \* \*
To subscribe for just this session: zctl sub help.d \* \*
To unsubscribe if you did the above: zctl unsub help.d \* \*
To ask or answer a question: zwrite -c help.d -i topic
To subscribe to instance help.d permanently: zctl add message help.d \*
To unsubscribe if you did the above: zctl del message help.d \*
To subscribe for just this session: zctl sub message help.d \*
To unsubscribe if you did the above: zctl unsub message help.d \*
To ask or answer a question: zwrite -i help.d
Sometimes people will send traffic to instance help.d.d, or
help.d.d.d, etc. (Much less often to -c help.d.d.) This is kind of
silly, since help.d is already for discussion, but people still do it.
Logs
----
There are logs of class help and class help.d in the zlogs locker, in
/mit/zlogs/help and /mit/zlogs/help.d. (Also split out by instance in
/mit/zlogs/help-by-instance and /mit/zlogs/help.d-by-instance.) There
are logs of instance help in /mit/zlogs/message/help or /mit/zlog/help.
Self Help
---------
Often you can find the answer to a question yourself. There are many
documentation resources under "Help" in the panel menu at the lower
left of the default login configuration; some of the more useful ones
are:
* The On-Line Consulting stock answers. You can also access these
by typing "olc answers" at the Athena prompt or visiting:
http://web.mit.edu/answers/
* The Athena "help" documentation. You can also access this
documentation by typing "help" at the Athena prompt or visiting:
http://web.mit.edu/olh/
In addition, many programs on Athena have man pages; for instance,
"man ssh" contains a wealth of information about how you might use the
ssh program.
Another useful tactic, particularly for non-Athena-specific questions,
is to do a web search for words related to your problem. For
instance, a www.google.com search for "Linux Thinkpad A22P" yields
several nice pages about installing Linux on that particular model of
laptop.
History
-------
Mark Ackerman and Leysia Palen wrote a paper in 1996 on instance help
and the conventions which had grown up around it, which some might
find interesting reading:
http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~ackerm/pub/96b20/zephyr.chi96.html
_The Tech_ Volume 119 Number 39 (September 2 1999) published an
article about instance help, but erroneously referred to it as class
help, which at the time was not widely used.
In late April 2000, a group of instance help residents began the
movement towards class help, and arranged for class help and class
help.d to be logged.