Hiya!

For reference, going through your user profile (sorry!), you've asked the following questions on AH, all in the space of the last three weeks:

• How did the muslim world (or just MENA) respond to the French Revolution and Napoleon's Invasion of Egypt?
• When we speak of gunboats during the era from say the American revolution-Napoleonic Wars-Am Civil War what types of ships do we mean?
• What was the Ottoman response to the French Revolution and Napoleon?
• How did public understanding of Rome/fall and establishment of the Roman Republic impact the 18th to mid 19th century revolutionaries (from say 1776 to 1848)?
• What happened to the Gallo-Roman aristocracy in north and south "France" after/during the fall of the Western Roman Empire?
• When did Roman history stop being a core part of the "common knowledge" all educated people were talked about
• What was the status of slaves and free blacks in post Somerset England?
• Who was Jack Cade?
• Why don't European aristocrats and kings have the sort of complex naming conventions of say the Chinese Emperors?
• Why was baseball considered such a quintessential part of American identity in the early 20th century?

A few things I'd highly recommend doing:

• Be specific, be clear. Everyone writing here at /r/Askhistorians is a volunteer. Writing up a detailed, original, well-sourced and in-depth response to an /r/Askhistorians question can consume an entire evening for me. Inevitably, a high quality response to a very broad question - for instance 'Why is the winter war (Finnish-Russian war) so important?' takes a large amount of time and effort. Speaking frankly, sometimes we simply won't be in the mood to spend several hours writing a response to a very vague question. By making your question clear and specific, you facilitate high quality responses by helping frame exactly what you want to know, and allowing for in-depth focus on a topic without several paragraphs of lead-up. An example here would be 'How accepted is Jacques R. Pauwels' "The Myth of the Good War: America in the Second World War" by the historical community?. With a clear, precise question, I was able to give a detailed answer without blowing a gasket and a whole evening to do so.

• Provide detail, not just a title. A common theme in your un-answered questions is that you provide little or no detail to your question, relying on the title alone to convey your query. That can work with an excellent title, but it's usually best to elaborate somewhat, in order to give the precision I outlined above. It's certainly necessary when your title is as abrupt and simple as 'Who was Jack Cade?'

• Ask interesting/novel questions. You've generally done this well, which is good to see. Interesting takes on well-covered areas of history are always nice to see, but this is obviously a very vague piece of advice.

• Finally, be patient. Many questions - probably a considerable majority of all questions on /r/askhistorians - will go unanswered. The academic rigor our community demands from its contributors also means that high quality answers will take a great deal of effort. It's a labour of love, but a labour nonetheless. People with the knowledge to answer your question may simply not be around when you ask it, or may not be willing/able to commit to the considerable effort it would take to do so. If there's a question you're very keen on that goes unanswered, wait a while and then re-post it. A question I asked some time ago concerning Horatio Nelson went completely unanswered the first time I posted it, and received several fantastic responses the second. Additionally - and I note you've done this - don't hesitate to contact knowledgeable users if you have questions about their field of expertise. Hopefully they'll be able to help out.

Sadly, there isn't One Easy Trick (Historians hate her! :O) to getting your /r/askhistorians question answered. However, in summary, the more effort you put into your question, the more interested people will be in it, and the more likely you'll be to get a high quality answer.

As an aside, sometimes you'll just be pot out of luck. /r/askhistorians is a fickle creature, where a question being heavily upvoted by the readership often has little to do with its quality or originality. A fascinating question about What happened to the Gallo-Roman aristocracy after the fall of Rome may be largely overlooked, while the week's 47th question about Erwin Rommel or why Constantinople got the works will inexplicably receive hundreds of upvotes, much to the chagrin of the general contributor-base. It's the nature of the beast, sadly, that sometimes fascinating questions will be overlooked by the readership because they're outside the mainstream, and go unanswered because the person with the expertise to do so is absent/on a coffee break.

I hope this helps!

A little while ago, I wrote up this guide on how to write better questions. I would say that is a good place to start. To reiterate the key points though:

• Make sure you have a clear, well written title that lets someone know what you are asking! Simple things like proper capitalization and punctuation can help too.
• Make sure to include details in the body of the post! This includes both specific sub-questions, which are a great way to help an answerer get direction on what you want, and also topical keywords especially are useful, since many flairs get IFTTT alerts (ie don't ask a question about a specific Chinese dynasty, and then not actually use the word "China" in your post).

Something that I didn't mention though is:

• Check the list of flaired users. Most of them like to feel wanted, so if you see someone who might be able to answer your question, don't feel shy about dropping them a short, polite message letting them know about the question!
• Also, it doesn't hurt to do a little research yourself. This ties into the earlier points, since if you have a little basis for your question, it allows you to make better sub-questions, and also just make for a generally more appealing phrasing of your question on the chance someone who knows about the topic sees it!
• And to add, if you ever need input on phrasing a question, we don't bite! Drop a modmail and we can give you some pointers.

In the end though, temper your expectations. We get over 100 questions a day, and while many of them get a reasonable answer, only a small number get that super-duper, amazingly in-depth ones that we all love to see, and there are a lot of factors that go into that happening. You need a) someone who knows the topic b) to see it, and c) to have the time to answer it. Sometimes that just doesn't happen unfortunately.