Five Things You Should Do Before Posting To Forums

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First off, I like newbies. I like their excitement and their drive.  I like what they bring to the community. What I don't like is ill-conceived posting of questions that require follow up questions. The community shouldn't have to pry pertinent information from the poster needed to answer the question.  I know, sometimes you don't know where to start or what to divulge. I always think that when asking a question one should always divulge as much as possible. But more importantly think through your post. Here are five things you should do prior to posting.

• 1) Provide a good background. We don't need the architecture of the entire application, but provide enough information for so we can see the general workflow of the page or function. Sometimes it is this background that allows the community to make suggestions on taking a different more efficient approach. But more than that, it allows you to think it out on paper. Sometimes writing it down in allows you to think through the problem yourself.
• 2) Did you test it yourself? I don't mean uploading it to the web server and accessing it through your browser. I mean setting breakpoints and watches and stepping through your code line by line to see what's happening on a line by line basis? I have seen too many posts where a simple break point would reveal that the method is never fired or the variable never set. Check out this simple tutorial on debugging. http://www.beansoftware.com/ASP.NET-Tutorials/Debuging-Breakpoints.aspx
• 3) Show me the code. There's nothing worse than questions like this, "My button is posting back twice. Can somebody help?" Where do you start in answering this? A snippet of the code on the front and back side will help out tremendously and speed up receiving the correct answer.
• 4) Have you tried to Google it? Have you searched the forum you are posting in? Chances are someone out there has had a similar problem and you can probably benefit from the steps they went about in attempting to solve it. http://bytes.com/groups/net-asp/543184-postback-twice-button-click
• 5) Now this one isn't necessarily a before posting gripe but a post posting gripe, MARK THE ANSWER. Nothing worse than finding a post exactly like the issue you are encountering only to find there wasn't any resolution. Even if no one answers your question and you solve it yourself, go back and post how it was solved. This is courtesy.

Recently I have been turned on to a really innovated Q&A Forum, http://www.stackoverflow.net/, that allows the community to vote up or vote down the best answer. The most helpful answers float to the top of the posting right below the question. This allows one to quickly find the most helpful answers. No more searching over pages and pages of posts only to find nothing helpful and nothing marked as resolved. Brilliant!

I hope this helps.

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