Hi Jim, thanks for reaching out and sorry for your issues! (Note I’ve moved your post to the appropriate category for the topic, since this is a meta issue about the Python Discourse rather than a help question about the Python language).
I haven’t been an involved party in any of your specific interactions on this forum, so I can’t speak directly to others’ motivations. However, as a moderator and neutral observer, I’ve comprehensively reviewed the threads you’ve been involved in, along with your message above and feedback users shared about this, and can try to answer your questions and provide some advice.
You certainly won’t be banned for simply asking about that, don’t worry! It’s great that you’ve reached out and are looking for feedback on this—that’s a big plus in my book.
Looking at our records, I don’t see any actions by or interactions with “forum management” (i.e. the mods, admins, etc) involving you. I do notice some other users giving you some suggestions, some gentler than others, on how to better communicate with others here, which I would generally agree with.
Overall, the main rule is to assume good faith and be kind, polite and respectful to others, especially when you’re asking the the folks here to volunteer their free time and energy to help you with your own problems. The more you do so, the more others are incentivized to help you. Likewise, others are expected to treat you the same way—if they don’t, flag the post or message the moderators about it.
The main topic of this Discourse as a whole is the Python language, rather than specific third party packages (like Qt) or IDEs (like PyCharm). Folks here will usually try to help if the question is clear, but may not necessarily have deep expertise in these other areas, and may also naturally focus on the more “Python” aspects of the problem given you posted it here. For particular questions about such other topics, you might get more helpful answers posting on other forums/venues specific to those topics.
Discussion is totally fine here, beyond just Q&A, so long as it is reasonably on-topic for the category (if it’s not, its easy for someone to move it); Python Help is the catchall for things that don’t fit in another category. However, separate topic threads are usually best for questions that are not directly related, like say trying to use QMake to build a project with setup.py
, vs. using Python’s debugger. That helps people who might be interested or knowledgeable about that topic find your questions, and other users who might have a similar one find their answers.
When people ask clarifying questions (including about your code) it is typically because that information is or might be needed to provide a useful answer to your question, the answer to your question depends/may depend on that information, or the information/explanation in your question is unclear to them (for which seeing the relevant bits of code would help clarify). While your question itself might not be directly “about” code, the answer to it may well depend on it (in ways that may not always be obvious to a newer user), or it might provide vital insight into what you are actually asking. So, I suggest you try your best to answer them/provide the requested information, or if not practical politely explain why.
Additionally, it can often help them understand if your reported problem is really a symptom of a larger problem that you can solve in a much easier/better way entirely, such as e.g. if you have a requestion about QMake but the real issue is trying to get an old Python project you have to build, asking questions and seeing your code can help people find a simpler and better way to do that. I noticed that, for example on your QMake thread, you discovered largely on your own that something else than what you were immediately asking actually solved your problem.
A couple other suggestions to help avoid these disconnects, based on observing the threads you’ve participated in:
-
As a number of others have been requesting of you, please try to use appropriate formatting in your posts to make it easy for others to understand what you’re asking about and give you the best help. In particular, I personally found some of your posts, like this one pretty hard to follow and understand due to missing formatting, e.g., quotes and code blocks, without which its hard to see what you’re writing vs. what (and whom) you’re responding to, and see the correct commands/code you’ve entered (as Discourse treats it as prose text and mangles it).
For quotes, just select the text in the post you want to quote and press the
Quote
button that pops up (or manually/via email, add a>
in front of the text), and for code blocks, select the text in your post and press the</>
button in the toolbar, or use code fences (triple backticks,`
, above and below). The preview window to the right is helpful to double check that everything looks right (if on web). -
Also, since you’re asking for ways to avoid disconnects and friction in communication—while you certainly don’t need to shoot for perfect grammar especially if English is not your first language like many other folks here, you could potentially consider using a tool (or a friend) to copyedit/proofread your writing to make it easier for others to read and understand.