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HowTo: Seek help from the community

This can be any community, discord, slack, telegram, anywhere you have a group of like-minded people willing to help each other. Asking for assistance from the community is somewhat of an art form. You have to consider that no one is obliged to answer your questions and therefore provide as much detail as possible to convince them you're not being lazy.

Convincing the community you are not being lazy. What do I mean by that? Well, you have to show that you've done the basics.

  • You've read through your code again
  • You've highlighted exactly what the error message is.
  • You've looked into what the error message means
  • You've identified the section in the code that the error message refers to (this is a particularly good one as the section concerned may be in a different file than the one you are looking at).
  • So you will need to draw their attention to the correct file in question to show you've done your homework.
  • You've looked on, e.g. stackoverflow, and found this or that. It tells the community you didn't just jump on discord expecting someone else to go on stackoverflow for you.

To summarise, this is about showing you have understood what the issue is before you simple ask the community for help.

Then there is the question of how do you ask for help. What should you say? To address this section, I'd say there is the long answer and the short one. What I propose below can be taken as either depending on your perspective and experience.

Here is what I believe most people would want to see.

  1. The community doesn't want to keep asking you for things.

    • If one needs to keep asking you for details then you haven't done it correctly and will soon find people stop responding.
    • Ask yourself what information you would need to know if you were the one helping someone else.
    • Have that information to hand before asking.

  2. Share what you are trying to do; i.e. what your code, with sample code, is supposed to do.

  3. Share the traceback error message. Depending on where you are asking for help, there are different ways of sharing this information. It also depends on the length of the message too.

  4. Share the code in question. This is where you have to be careful. Do not share the code you THINK is responsible, but the section of code as mentioned in the traceback message. Typically, I would share a section below and above the one shown in the error message.

  5. You may be working in a stack that may have log files outside your immediate workspace. Be sure you check and include any error messages shown there too.

  6. Be very detailed in your asking for help. Avoid using things like "it", "says error", and other non-specific terms. Without fully understanding the issue no one can help you.

Examples of wrong ways to ask for help:

feel free to contribute to this list to help show folks what to avoid when asking for help