HTML, CSS, JS and other unsorted stuff

Sometimes I ask questions in forums. In English speaking forums in English. Most of the time if I have a technical problem I can't solve alone. Some people might say that I should ask in forums that are in my native language, but that is quite problematic. About 80-90 million people might speak my language in a more or less fluent way, but there are about 500 million people who speak English as their native language, and the same amount again who that speak it as their second or third language. English is the de facto standard for technical communication in the Internet, even people from the former cold war opponent countries visit English speaking forums and write in English. Now imagine I spoke Maltese as my native language (unfortunately I do not), would you suggest that I ask about programming problems in a Maltese speaking forum?

Obviously not.

Coming back to the first point:

Answering my questions may be simple for you, it might even be that the answer is just one forum thread or a quick search away but please don't insult me by answering "Use the search!" or "Use Google!".
I did.
I can search.
Everybody can search.
Please don't think I am lazy or stupid, searching is not the problem, finding is it.


Search terms that may come easy to you might not come to my mind. The reasons for that can be either that you have the necessary background in the topic or you can speak a better English, or you might even be a native English speaker.

It may seem to some people as if I were quite fluent in in English but this is a misconception. Don't get me wrong, my passive knowledge is by far greater than my active knowledge and I really try to write as well as I can. Sometimes I even use a dictionary or thesaurus to improve my forum postings.

How can you help me?

If you want to help me to improve my search capabilities, please give me the search string you used.

If it was a Google search string, please give me a direct link too. Google returns different results in different countries. I have compared the search results I get with the search results of people in other countries. The results differ, even if we use exactly the same search term at the same time. I might not see the same results as you see.

There are more than 5 billion people in this world, please consider, that most of the people don't speak your language.

If you want to meet me on equal terms, try to answer my questions in my native language, which is German by accent and accident. OK, that is a joke (nur wenn Ihre Muttersprache nicht ebenfalls Deutsch ist ), but as in every good joke, there was a little bit of truth in it.

Think about it.