Tips on getting help from the forums
 

I have seen some very vague topics requesting help on the forums, that are impossible for anyone to answer without asking for a lot of information in order to help solve them. This means they often get left unanswered.

So I thought I would write a some tips on getting help that will help the original poster get the best help and support and the best response and also that will help the people trying to help.

• Before you post your problem, do a search on the forum, it is most than likely someone else has had the same problem and the solution has already be answered. Saving you time posting the same message and people answering the same question 100s of times.

• Thread Title - this is like a window into your thread, it should say at a glance what your thread is about. stylevar Block Background not updating on my site, is better than Help me please.
• Message Contents - please try to add as much detail as possible (your vb version etc) and any error messages and screenshots, if possible, this can help so much, too much detail will never be frowned upon.
• Don't expect your message to be answered to in 5 minutes, please be patient

• Read your message before you submit, use the preview post, to make sure it is understandable and that you haven't forgot anything (I am always editing my posts after I have preview them)

We have an excellent community here, who are very willing to help, be it vbulletin staff, vbulletin.org or board owners, but in turn they do need the information to work with first.

Please do not take this as preaching, it is just meant to help everyone to help each other.

If anyone has anymore tips or advice on forum support, please feel free to post them.

P.S. Something that has helped me a lot, is to install a local version of my forum and populate it will a backup of my database from my live forum, that way I can mess about with it and if it goes wrong I just overwrite the database, get yourself a copy of ones of the WAMP (I use Wampserver for windows), LAMP or MAMP packages and start messing about with your forum in safety.