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# What debugging/research should I try before asking for help on the various technical forums?

0 votes
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asked Mar 23 in Authoring by AndrewS (250 points)
recategorized Mar 27 by Alex
It's tough to balance doing enough checking vs finally asking the question. Roadblocks appear when we don't ask a timely question, but we all recognize asking repeated frivolous/trivial questions can be annoying. How can we find a happy medium?

- programming
- community

commented Mar 24 by Dannii (329 points)
I think there's a bit of a difference between what you should do if you think you've found a bug compared to just want help with a problem. The tag suggests bugs, but the question sounds like solving a programming problem. Which do you want to focus on in this question?
commented Mar 24 by Alex (486 points)
This question is too vague. It doesn't sound like something anybody would actually ask. Also, it's about asking questions on intfiction.org - which is something that is better asked on that forum itself.
commented Mar 24 by Juhana (246 points)
I don't think this is a bad question as such, but it might be better if it wasn't forum-specific (prob no difference where you ask) and if it was rephrased as something like "what general debugging steps should I take before asking for help."
commented Mar 24 by AndrewS (250 points)
Alex, I disagree strongly. Maybe the wording is awkward, but if people get wrapped up in "should I ask/shouldn't I" they don't move on to another problem. And I haven't seen guidelines for that. The thing is, there's a minimum you should do, and there's a maximum you should feel you have to do, and anything between that--definitely, post it and don't get stuck.
I think intfiction.org in parrticular can be intimidating--it's easy to feel 1) you should know this after X years or 2) everyone else knows this, and you don't know where to look.
I have to admit, this was a sideways poke because I'd never really seen a topic like this in intfiction.org in about four years. So, the question: either it needs to be there, or there's a reason it's not there, but I think it's worth exploring.
And yes, it is very sideways. It's a place I feel a lot less comfortable around after Mike Snyder got chased. So this may be off-topic, and it may be a deletable message, but I think it's important for any forum that concentrates on this to have guidelines so people can feel comfortable asking questions.
Juhana...yeah, I agree. That is a much better topic name. So I changed it.
commented Mar 24 by Dannii (329 points)
I think the new title is better, but still think you should clarify the ambiguity!
commented Mar 24 by AndrewS (250 points)
Thanks, Dannii. I thought I changed it, but I did not. I tried to clean up the title a bit more, too.

## 2 Answers

0 votes
answered Mar 23 by AndrewS (250 points)
My rule of thumb is to give 3 documentation searches and also to provide 1 or 2 things that didn't work. I also try to cut down the code to something manageable.
Sometimes when I try to hone an example, I find what I was doing wrong, and I don't need to ask a question. That saves everyone a bit of time.
I also try to provide a bridging question e.g. "If I could do X or Y I'd be okay, but I don't see how to. What link am I missing?"
I think discussing these small victories elsewhere is worthwhile, but I don't want to clutter up the help board with them.
0 votes
answered Mar 23 by bg (692 points)
edited Mar 25 by bg

It's good to also do a search on the forum or site in question to see if a similar question has been answered before.
The search function on the intfiction.org site isn't the best, but you can put something like the following into a regular search engine to search the site for information about, say, a font in Gargoyle:
site:intfiction.org Gargoyle font

And you'd come up with search results like these: www.google.com/search?q=site:intfiction.org+Gargoyle+font

commented Mar 25 by dw (9 points)
linky (show a specific example using a search engine).

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