The libcurl maintainer got/gets emails[1] asking for technical support on people's cars because they likely stumbled across his email address in the mandatory license text.

1. https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/11/14/i-have-toyota-corola/

Reminds me also of this exchange the maintainer of thttpd had with a repo guy: http://acme.com/software/thttpd/repo.html

Or the time Tuttle (a city in Oklahoma) threatened to sue call the FBI on CentOS: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/24/tuttle_centos/

(I'm somewhat amused that the website in question still doesn't seem to work 13 years later.)

And why do they feel it's appropriate to ask for help there? This would be like going to a talk from a presidential candidate about fuel economy, and raising your hand and saying "My car doesn't start, can you help me?"

Probably a relatively new internet user with little understanding of how the whole thing works. Just uses it to watch content.

If “Facebook” is the internet to you, typing into the first comment box you find seems more reasonable than finding an FAQ.

User seems to even have their spell-check in French mode - possibly not even using their own computer to ask the question.

[OT] Non-English speaker here. Is there any difference (in grammar and/or meaning) between "an FAQ" and "a FAQ"? I'm asking because it sounds good but it goes against the little English grammar I remember from school...

"a" vs. "an" is based on the first sound of the word, not the first letter. You would say "an honor" but "a hair" because, while they both start with the letter h, one has a silent h and the other doesn't.

If you pronounce "FAQ" by spelling out the letters (and not like "fack"), it starts with "eff", so you should say "an FAQ." I think that's the pronunciation I usually hear.

In particular it's "a" if the following word starts with a non-vowel sound, and "an" for a vowel sound.

Compare:

  an SQL command
  a SQL command

I think I hear both "ess queue ell" and "sequel" for SQL frequently, but "eff ay queue" for FAQ way more than "fack."

I didn't encounter "sequel" until some years after I encountered "ess-queue-ell" - had no idea what the person was on about to start with.

I guess it's one of those things that native English speakers don't even know they know. Like "Fewer tests means Less data", rather than "less tests means fewer data", or "six charming small new round green plastic tables" rather than "six plastic charming green round new small tables".

Or that "the" is pronounced "thuh" before consonant sounds and "thee" before vowel sounds - same rules as "a"/"an" but no difference in spelling!

During a congressional hearing, a US Congress representative asked Sundar Pichai for tech support about his daughter's iPhone: https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/11/18136377/google-sundar-p...

It was not an off-topic question, it was making a point about political ads and has nothing to do with the above.

Have you ever been to an open forum? This is exactly what it's like.

Oh boy. I guess you haven't noticed but it's ubiquitous. Every communication channel for a popular program is filled with help requests and feature requests. It might've been alright back in the day when there were much fewer people on the web and apps like VLC were for enthusiasts.

A bug tracker with feature requests for a popular app is like a gang rape these days. Hundreds upon hundreds of “Why is it still not fixed, it should take just ten minutes!!!” The weirdest thing is, trackers for things like Intellij Idea or Node.js are similarly filled with every problem, wish and opinion that users have—you'd think that programmers should know better but apparently not. “Tab to exit parentheses is essential for me, I'm not migrating from Eclipse until this is implemented!”

I almost completely stopped posting issues without code when I saw the scale of this phenomenon.

This is what I like with Stack Overflow. Most of this kind of posts are removed. Starting to contribute and following the review queues was mind opening. Also it helps me a lot to improve my own question.

Covert spam?

1) Spammer uses a bot to post harmless automated comments

2) Waits for a while, than looks which of his comments ranks higher in Google

3) Edits some of top-ranked comments to include usual viagra ads with hyperlinks to promoted websites

This sort of thing was so much more common (and worse) in the late 90s/early 2000s.

You couldn't write a blog post about some security finding or integration achievement without it attracting a slew of comments from clueless outsourced contractors begging you to teach them how to build or deploy a related enterprise-scale solution.