Don't get me wrong: There are many legit reasons for sending something directly to an OSS maintainer. But not when your attention span doesn't last until the second paragraph of the README.
And it's always students doing that, often worded as if they were entitled to my help. 
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To be clear: those are not my students or anything like that. Just students from somewhere on the globe. I usually just reply with quoting the relevant sentence from the README, bc that's easier than explaining etiquette. But it feels like rewarding them for shitty behavior.
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End of conversation
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Paraphrasing Jim Williams (of Linear Technology fame): "Didn't read the manual? Then you shall have no pie."
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The classic answer is RTFM.
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I would send them a link to this: How To Ask Questions The Smart Way, by
@esrtweet http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html …Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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If they are students, I think it's okay to tell them exactly like you did here. The whole point of being a student is learning, and if they act like this it might just be because really no one has told them yet this is not okay.
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