My relationship with StackOverflow is almost religious. During the summer of 2016, I was asked to produce an add-in for Microsoft Outlook. At the time I had absolutely no experience regarding C# or Microsoft products whatsoever. To put things in perspective, I wasn’t even aware of the existence of Visual Studio. After receiving my assignment, the first thing I did was search StackOverflow. Posts like this are what saved me. The irony here is that this question qualifies as mediocre. By definition it’s vague. However, for beginners these posts are what set the groundwork for everything.
Here is an example, albeit poorly written in the sense that it’s not even posed as a question and there are no capital letters which is something of an eyesore . . . that directly states the problem. No wasted words and very specific. In this instance I would like to point out that I know exactly the issue that the questioner is dealing with and in my experience this isn’t the solution.
The point of all of this, in my opinion, is that I don’t think there is a smart or dumb way to ask a question. Or at the very least I don’t think that the labels “smart” and “dumb” are appropriate. There’s only a right way and a wrong way. However you put it, on StackOverflow, you’ll more than likely get a response. Right or wrong is determined by whether you receive the response you wanted.