This question is motivated by a series of questions in the past few days from one user who was clearly progressing through setting up a calculation and working through their errors one by one. Some of their questions in this series were troubleshooting questions, and some easily answered with a link to documentation. Such questions are not inherently bad, for example, python stack overflow is full of them and is often my go-to for my own python quick googles. But they are more likely to be written in the spur of the moment and, I suspect, more likely to be abandoned even if answered well, without the answer being accepted.
So I would like to broaden the discussion towards what can be good practices or advice we can recommend in the context of making calculations work before starting a question. The "homework" etiquette of chemistry.se is similar, but I cannot seem to find a citable formulation of it. Examples I can think of:
- Check documentation, especially if it is good. For example, LAMMPS and VASP have decent or better documentation, arguably better than basic python.
- Try a couple of things to solve the problem, even if you do not know what can help.
- Consider what is fundamental to the question and what is not. We seem to see a lot of questions more or less "how do we do XYZ for system ABC" where the specific ABCD could plausibly be exchanged for something else. The specification of the system ABCD makes the question less likely to be found when another user later needs to do XYZ for system EFGH.
In my ideal world, I would be able to point back to this discussion when commenting on questions that fall in this category. I will consider a separate discussion of didactic or tutorial-type answers helping folks troubleshoot rather than providing light-on-context standalone answers. In the simplest terms, this one is for questions answerable by "it is in the documentation".
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