Need some Hayulp? Well,, we need information in order to help you.

I think its time we put our heads together & work up a kind of list/guideline of sorts, of info the forum needs in order to decrease the confusion/frustration & get people the help they need quicker,

Of course , what year, how many miles,

If there has been any recent work done. What was done just before the bike started acting up,, including getting gas, did the problem present itself "In full bloom" or did it start off small & get worse,,

Its cool including stuff about "Mods on the bike", but, including those & not explaining the bike has run fine for a year after those mods is really not helpful.,
If the problem is there the first time its started after a mod,, well,, mite just wanna have a look at what was just done,,
I digress.,
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Okay, folks, how can we put together kind of a forum form?
Could we do that & put it somewhere & when someone starts asking questions & we start offering ideas & then more pertinent info leaks out & we off more ideas & then they Finally get around to telling the whole story  the answer is dead obvious & would have been obvious in the beginning,, well,, you get where IM going, I hope,.,
So, waddo youse guys think?

and I'm wrong a lot... Huh...


Hey! Looka thayur! Youre RIGHT!

Just draw up a standard form with all the basic info needed like you proposed, then have it posted up somewhere on the forums or on a tab at the top if the mysterious johnh doesn't mind doing that and just have people copy it in their post and fill it out.  

The last few noobs needing help range from those that spill their guts to those that "got a problem" and you're left to wonder what that problem is.

And problems vary from a burnt out light bulb to a smuldering heap upon the ground.

For a burnt out light, I don't need to know year, mileage or mods unless it concerns that particular light.  A burnt out kickstand light on a '99 is an easy fix... you don't got one.  But I need that info for a '88 with 32k miles that won't start.

Another common problem is terminology.  Is studdering lugging or surging?  We could really use a list of common terms and there meaning.

When I worked in Apple developer support, almost all questions were of the type; "when I do this, that happens - why?"   However, very few would give enough details about the context or environment surrounding the problem.   In order to alleviate the usual (and inevitable) back-n-forth and expedite the solution, we posted a "How to ask a question" in the forum header.   Then, whenever a question was asked where it was obvious the asker didn't follow the rules, we would refer them to that forum entry first.   The format can be loosely defined so you only fill in the pertinent portions.  In other words, if you're asking about the cam chain, your custom muffler is probably unrelated.

Savage_Rob wrote on 09/30/12 at 15:36:06:

I had tried to work this out, but it's just too much effort for me.

but a combined effort could get it done.

pick a symptom, additional questions to weed it out and propose how to fix it.

I moved jog's last post to start the basic troubleshootin' post.

In his last post ( #22 ) he said it turned out to be "bad gas".

If someone were VERY motivated, this could actually be fully automated, given the combined knowledge base of the forum.  If you think about it, all the past questions and answers are really an information database.  Employing regression, one could go back thru the archives and build the required question & answer tree. Then, strip out the redundancy and wrong answers and you have an efficient, useful, and quick tool (kinda like me in my youth, altho according to some of my girlfriends, I was a little too quick sometimes).

Years ago there was a language particularly suited to artificial intelligence and this kind of application, called LISP (from LISt Processing).   I experimented with it in college (40 years ago), but haven't touched it since, plus, it has likely been superseded with bigger-better-faster nowadays anyway.  One of cool things about LISP is it would "learn" thru association.  In other words, you didn't have to "hard relate" every cause-n-effect.   Instead, you gave it all the data, a skeletal structure with some rules, and it filled in the rest of the tree thru logical inference.  It was also dynamic, so it would ask context questions we humans might forget...  "does this only happen on startup?".   Lastly, it was also easy to add new stuff to the database and LISP would stash it and associate it intelligently.  In a way, it would be like having a HAL2000 of Savage knowledge.  "I'm sorry JOG, I'm afraid I can't associate that"    

Ahhh, if only I were more motivated