How to ask a question
You want help from the community at large; you've decided where you're
going to 
ask your question, but how do you
phrase it?
Excellent "general" advice (how to ask questions of anyone) is
contained in
Eric Raymond's article on the topic.
Eric's an extremely self-confident person, and this comes through in
his advice; but his guidelines are very good, even for us in the
un-self-confident majority.  It's important to remember that you don't
have a right to advice from the world, but that if you express
yourself well, you will usually find someone who will be pleased to
help.
So how do you express yourself in the (La)TeX world?  There aren't
any comprehensive rules, but a few guidelines may help in the
application of your own common sense.
-  Make sure you're asking the right people.  Don't ask in a TeX
  forum about printer device drivers for the Foobar
  operating system.  Yes, TeX users need printers, but no, TeX
  users will typically not be Foobar systems
  managers.
  Similarly, avoid posing a question in a language that the majority
  of the group don't use: post in Ruritanian to
  de.comp.text.tex and you may have a long wait before a
  German- and Ruritanian-speaking TeX expert notices your
  question.
 
-  If your question is (or may be) TeX-system-specific, report
  what system you're using, or intend to use: "I can't install
  TeX" is as good as useless, whereas "I'm trying to install the
  mumbleTeX distribution on the Grobble
  operating system" gives all the context a potential respondent
  might need.  Another common situation where this information is
  important is when you're having trouble installing something new in
  your system: "I want to add the glugtheory package to my
  mumbleTeX v12.0 distribution on the Grobble 2024
  operating system".
-  If you need to know how to do something, make clear what your
  environment is: "I want to do x in Plain TeX", or "I
  want to do y in LaTeX running the boggle
  class".  If you thought you knew how, but your attempts are
  failing, tell us what you've tried: "I've already tried installing
  the elephant in the minicar directory, and it
  didn't work, even after refreshing the filename database".
-  If something's going wrong within (La)TeX, pretend you're
  
  
  submitting a LaTeX bug report,
  and try to generate a minimum failing example.  If your example
  needs your local xyzthesis class, or some other resource
  not generally available, be sure to include a pointer to how the
  resource can be obtained.
-  Be as succinct as possible.  Your helpers probably don't need to
  know why you're doing something, just what you're
  doing and where the problem is.
This question on the Web: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=askquestion