Guide: How to Ask For Help

You're stuck, frustrated and need help.

We get it. We've all been there. In order to get help, the community needs help from you too. Use this guide to help you get the help you need, as fast as possible.

Here's your path to happiness

1. Be respectful
2. Make as much progress as you can
3. Open your post in the correct category
4. Make your issue reproducible
5. Be clear in feature requests
6. Format your code
7. Keep the discussion on-topic
8. Thank your community members

Review our community guidelines to get a full understanding of what we expect from our community, but you should keep reading to understand more details on each of these points.

Be respectful

Remember when you're asking for help, you're asking for a favor. Curb your frustrations, remove any sarcasm, and be respectful. Be extra sensitive to this if you're asking for help on an open source project or a community supported product. The friendlier you are, the more likely you are to get help.

If you're in a tight time crunch, never apply this pressure to another community member. If you need priority, consider hiring a professional consultant.

Make as much progress as you can

• Are you searching the internet with the right keywords?
• Is there any other way you can approach the problem?
• Can you break the problem into smaller chunks and solve it one problem at a time?
• Have you checked the documentation thoroughly?
• Have you reviewed similar issues in the project's issue tracker or community?
• Have you tried debugging the problem yourself first?

Open your post in the correct category

Open your post in the correct category or channel. This helps your chances of getting your question in front of the right people.

Make your issue reproducible

Don't come to a community and say "I get this error, please solve it". This approach isn't productive and creates unnecessary noise without helping anyone find a solution.

Start with this template. We use this format to help reproduce issues as quickly as possible:

# 👉 Describe the problem
[comment]: <> (A clear and concise description of the problem)
- 

# 📝 Steps to reproduce
[comment]: <> (How to reproduce the bug)
- 

# 🙏 Expected behavior
[comment]: <> (What you expected to happen)
- 

# 🔥 Actual behavior
[comment]: <> (What actually happened)
- 

# 🌎 Environment
[comment]: <> (What is your environment? What is your operating system? What is your browser? What is your version of the software/framework/library?)
- 

# 📸 Additional context
[comment]: <> (Add any other context like URLs, screenshots, etc. about the problem here.)
-

Include as much detail as possible, but make sure it's scannable and easy to read. If something requires a little extra explanation, consider recording a video with Loom (or similar) and sharing it in your post. Don't overwhelm others with too much information.

Be clear in feature requests

If your question relates to about asking for a new feature, make sure you help scope the problem and your proposed solution. We once stumbled upon a post called "Feature Requests That Don't Suck" and we were really inspired by it.

Use this as a template to help you scope the problem and your proposed solution.

# 👉 Describe the problem
[comment]: <> (What are you trying to solve?)

# 👥 Problem evidence & reach
[comment]: <> (How many people have this problem?)

# 🏆 How to solve this problem
[comment]: <> (Describe the feature that you are proposing and how it will solve the problem)

### Detail 1
* A
* B
* C

### Detail 2
* E
* F
* G

# 🥰 Describe the "impact" on users?
[comment]: <> (How will this make people's lives better once it is solved?)

# 💯 How do we validate the problem is solved?
[comment]: <> (Explain use cases on how we can measure the success of this implementation)

Be patient with feature requests -- especially for open source and community supported products. Implementing a feature to solve your specific use case may not always be the answer. Solving a problem once is easy, but solving the problem for everyone can require more effort and care.

If you submit a feature request and would like to have it prioritized, have others up-vote to get it on the maintainers' radar, consider sponsoring the project, or consider hiring a professional consultant to build the feature for you.

Format your code

Posting a wall of text without syntax highlighting will dramatically reduce your chances of getting help. In order to make it easier for others to read your code, it is very important to format your code correctly.

Inline code

You can wrap your inline code with the "backticks" (`). Like this:

`inline code`

Multi-line code

You can wrap multi-line code by using three backticks (```). Always specify the language for proper syntax highlighting.

function example() {
    console.log("Hello World");
}

Multi-line, Multi-file

If you have multiple files you can use the "Hide Details" function to clearly label it. You can do this by wrapping your code in the [details="filename.extension"][/details] tags.

[details="app.js"]
``javascript
var app = new Vue({
  el: '#app',
  data: {
    message: 'Hello Vue!'
  }
})
``
[/details]

[details="index.html"]
``html
<script type="text/javascript" src="app.js"></script>
<h1>Hello world!</h1>

``
[/details]

Keep the discussion on-topic

While community members chime in to help, make sure to keep the discussion on-topic. If you discover a new issue, create a new issue. Also, if you're using something like Discord, always create a thread from the original post and respond within that thread. Don't flood everyone's notifications inside the main channel.

Thank your community members

When someone helps you out, be sure to thank them. It's a small gesture, but it goes a long way. Help other community members out by marking your post as resolved (if possible).

Maintaining a quality community culture

We're all about maintaining a quality community culture. There's nothing that excites us more than meeting other engineers who are excited to build and learn more.

We enforce this guide to help protect the community and ensure that everyone is having a great experience. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to a moderator at anytime.