Helping in the Forums

Sticky II

 

The purpose of the forums is to help.

WordPress has a reputation of having good forums which provide fast and friendly help, and it is up to everyone who contributes to that to continue this good work.

If someone posts a request for help, you have no idea how much effort they may or may not have put in to trying to find a solution. You have no idea how frustrated they may be. You have no idea what else they do in their life and what other skills they may possess. We all have situations where we cannot see the obvious, and we have all been helped out, at some time or another, in many different ways.

Who can help ?

You can !

Everyone using WordPress has learned along the way. Some people know about PHP, some about CSS, some about those 'little things' which seem to fall into no category of their own. No-one in the forums knows it all. No-one. But you can contribute, and if you do, the first time someone posts back saying "Thank you" will make you smile. There is no goal of answering the most, or answering the best - the single goal is to treat each post the same and do what we can to help the person who wrote it.

If you can't help with some posts, it doesn't matter. But if there is one that you know the answer to, or you can direct them to a resource with the answer, then do it.

So with all the above in mind.....

1. Do not assume too much, but do not patronise either. If someone posts that their styleswitcher is not working, that tells us very little. Even if you do not know the answer yourself, you will have seen that pretty much the first thing we ask for is more information:
   • Which version of WP ?
   • Which styleswitcher ?
   • Is the plugin activated ?
2. Be explicit when talking about changes. Say what has to be altered and where - if you can, give a code snippet to demonstrate this.
3. Do not be condescending toward people. Yes you may know more, but you knew squat at one point too.
4. Register
5. If you are contributing to a thread and it suddenly goes into territory you know nothing about, then say so. Someone may not want to 'jump in' on a thread you appear to be sorting out, so you saying that you are of no further use gives the green light to others who may be able to assist.
6. Try to go back through some threads you have helped in to see if a topic has been resolved. If it hasn't consider posting to that thread asking if the original poster has got everything sorted.
7. Read threads - you will learn a lot and be able to help more. Bookmark any useful stuff.
8. Have a good look around the Docs link on wp.org, the wiki, the faq and sites such as Weblogtoolscollection and Wordlog. Just saying to someone "You might find something there" and giving them a link won't help and will increase their frustration. Point them to a specific place.
9. Be prepared for the occasional 'anon' posting which either insults you, or the person being helped. Ignore it. Try not to rise to the bait. If they are not prepared to register, then they are not worth considering.
10. Don't feel that just because you started answering, that you are obliged to keep contributing to that thread. If things being said are annoying you, leave it for a while. A 'smartass' comment does not help - it only makes you feel smug and look unhelpful in other people's eyes.
11. If a person has a site that has many validation errors, you may want to point that out, but address their problem FIRST. If their problem will not be impacted by the validation, then tell them the answer - we are not here to be evangelical.
12. If a person's site looks odd in a certain browser, then be prepared to help that person in fixing the error. Simply telling them to learn more CSS isn't the way.
13. Let's all start ignoring the single (or double) word posts.