A review of your recent questions suggests that you are using AskHistorians to help research your novel. This is a subreddit for honest inquiry, one which holds itself to higher standards than many other subreddits (like r/askreddit) - answers are expected to be from individuals that have studied the relevant material, and are able to not only answer the question but to support their answers and to handle any follow-up questions as necessary. Particularly good users are even invited to submit for flair, to let other people know that they've been vetted as having a degree of expertise in certain subjects and a history of writing good answers. These answers go beyond a trip to Wikipedia or a simple google search, but generally involve a considerable amount of time and effort, hours of study in areas that they are passionate about, often involving sources which are not readily available online.

All of which they do for free, on a volunteer basis.

However, you appear to be attempting to create a commercial work based on that material. Which is, at best, profiting off the work of others. You also don't appear to be asking for sources so you can figure these things out yourself, but the answers to specific questions that you can turn around and plug into your writing. That's not really being fair to the folks that make AskHistorians work...and it does go to show that if you could Google it yourself, you would naturally have done so rather than ask others for help.

What you have been told is that while it is fine to ask for help with research for your series on the Gulf War and other commercial products here, you are more likely to get help for something that is going to make you money and potentially bankable reputation if you offer to pay people.

We provide educational content for free and for those willing to learn and interested in history on a volunteer basis but also encourage those who want our contributors' knowledge in order to make money off of it to provide payment for services rendered. After all, why should people here do work for you for free? And seeing as we want you to get your info, the reminder that if you want work in service of a commercial product, it is easier to get said information if you offer payment, is really our service to you.

However, if you don't see the point of compensating people to put hours of their time and their expertise they gained over years into helping you out with a show, a book or anything else that will net you profit and reputation, I highly encourage you to take your questions to google in the future.

u/commiespaceinvader answered this well, but I'd also point out that not all research is digitized and not all answers are available on Google. The people here who deeply study subjects tend to know about things from doing archival research -- for example, this recent thread drops some knowledge gained from studying one specific manuscript that's not digitized and available in its original form in an archive in The Hague.

You're welcome to keep using this forum to get questions answered, assuming you can follow our rules. But a direct solicitation for information related to a commercial product may well produce that reminder posted previously.

Thanks!

You're free at any time to Google-search the terms of your query; no one on this subreddit can possibly stop you. You're equally free to search for related keywords at your local public library, or to ask at a university research desk, or to hit up JSTOR, and so on. All these things are normal aspects of researching a work of fiction or learning more about a topic that interests you. What people are drawing on when they submit questions to AskHistorians is the the collective historical expertise of all the scholars (flaired and otherwise) who hang out here answering questions. A Google search might turn up unreliable or poorly-sourced resources, or websites where other people with no more familiarity on the topic than I have are spitballing their ideas about [how nuclear missiles are decommissioned/why people think Beowulf is a classic/etc.] -- their ideas about those topics aren't necessarily any better than mine, and I as a casual reader might not even know that these people don't know what they're talking about when it comes to nuclear warfare or Old English poetry. Even a search of scholarly sources might only turn up materials that are considered outdated, or materials with infamously bogus research behind them, or materials that don't address my question directly. When I'm asking questions here, I'm appealing to individual scholars' ability to read way more about a subject than I have, to write more papers, to do more research, to attend more classes and lectures, etc. than I can on that topic and give me an interesting answer to an interesting question. At its best, this means my idle question gets turned into an actually interesting and informative piece of writing, a lot of people learn something new, and somebody who potentially spent a lot of time and money getting educated on a topic gets to talk about something that interests them. I'm not guaranteed an answer, but that's the risk I'm taking when I ask someone a question on Reddit for free.