How to get answers to your scripting questions

[pixelwit]

How to get answers to your scripting questions:

• Title your post properly. A descriptive title attracts the attention of a person who might know the answer to your question while a vague title will go unnoticed only to be read by someone who happens to "stumble" upon it.
  
• Ask short, clear and concise questions. If you can get a reader to understand your problem then you're half way to finding an answer.
  
• Ask intelligent questions. While there may not be any stupid questions, there certainly are smart ones. A smart question shows you've done your homework or researched your problem a little, in short it shows that you "have a clue". Helping those who can help themselves is much more rewarding than helping someone who will forever require help.
  
• Try to use something close to proper English when asking a question. A person who can't form a sentence probably won't grasp the finer details of a programming "language" either (and therefore will fall into the "clueless" category alluded to previously). If English isn't your native language, let people know about it (taking the time to fill in the "Location" field of your User Profile may help with this). I can't speak for everyone but I tend to have more respect for someone struggling with English as a second language than I would for someone who's gone through 12 years or more of school and still doesn't get it.
  
• Ask an original question. Sometimes it's fun to get involved in a unique problem even though it may be complex or difficult. Such questions tend to educate both the person asking the question and the person answering it.
  
• Search before you ask. Questions which have been asked a thousand times before tend to go unanswered. Nobody wants to repeat the same answer over and over again. The best way to find out if your question has been asked before is to use the search button at the top right of every forum page.
  
• Help other people. If you've taken the time to help the community the community will generally take time to help you.
  
• Strip, ZIP and Clip. When attaching (Clipping) a file to better illustrate your problem, be sure to reduce (Strip) it to its bare essentials so as to minimize the amount of time spent sifting through extraneous code. Compressing (Zipping) your file also minimizes the amount of time the person trying to help you will spend waiting for your file to download. Doing these things shows you're willing to help others help you.
  
• [useastags]
  
• Post your question in the most appropriate forum. While your question may fit into more than one category you should only post your question once in the forum most likely to be read by people who would know the answer. Posting your question more than once is called "cross-posting" and is frowned upon since it litters the forum database and wastes the time of a person responding to your question when you've already received an answer elsewhere.
  
• Don't ask for too much. If it would take a book's worth of knowledge to fully answer your question then you should probably buy the book.
  
• Thank those who help you. If you can't take the time to thank or otherwise acknowledge someone who has taken the time to help you, chances are that person (or others who read the the thread) won't take the time to help you again. If you can't be bothered to say thanks, other people surely can't be bothered to help you.

Hopefully these tips will help you attain quicker and better responses to your Flash scripting questions.

If anyone else has suggestions they'd like to add, feel free to do so.

-PiXELWiT
http://www.pixelwit.com

[CyanBlue]

Thank you for taking time to make nice note for the new comers, pixelwit...

This one should be the global sticky...

How about No crossposting, no PMing, and using the vbCode to format the script???

Oh... oh... One more tip to get the fastest answer...
Use big bold face text with all capital letters...
Of course, I am just joking...

[farafiro]

will we ever see this as a sticky one??

seems that pixelwil have reached the max limit

[McGiver]

thanks, but I don't think you will reach anything by posting it here

[junahu]

Good points. But I don't think scripting questions should be so specific (I.e "Waaaah! I need help with my website. Waaah! I want to plagerise this effect"). Examples are always nice as a picture is worth a thousand words. And don't for heavans sake just post your fla and expect somone to do the work for you!

(rant over)

[Colin Campbell]

Yeah, I agree with all these posts. I like an over-view of everything that effects the code and/or object. And what you're trying to accomplish. I hate it when they post something, ask for help, and then expect top-quality help with low-quality questions. Too often I find myself pressing the "Post Reply" button, and then second guessing posting because of the lack of vital information. i wish every poster knew what was going on, but then forums wouldn't be what they are. Theres always the oblivious new people, and the oblivious experienced people who stick around for god knows why. But thats why I like posting here.

Heres another idea for something like this. When the user presses register, after entering in all the info, and submitting the user info before getting the registration email *I hope you follow, hard to describe* pop-up a java script alert. It should give out some "helpful" tips on posting questions, what to do before *like search the forums* posting a question, and what to do afterwards *like not give up and hope someone on the forums can finish it all for you*

Hope this post is somewhat literate... all I see is babble ,

Colin

EDIT: One more thing, I suggest to people that they should throw the version number of flash they are using onto the first post too... its seems too often the second post, which could easily be used to answer a question, is used to query what version number it is... just some helpful tips. Good night all.

[Jesse]

Great post. Similar to something I ran a year or so ago. I've made it sticky in this forum and added an announcement on all forums.

[junahu]

Splashing popup in a user's face will only aggravate them. Perhaps a pm when a user first joins? Or perhaps putting these tips in the faq section.

...alternately we could just obliterate newbies off the face of the planet (Althought then we'd be without sustenance and we'd have to eat eachother to survive)

[littleRichard]

@Jesse, I didn't check all the forums but in the MX forum the link to this thread isn't clickable.

[Jesse]

All fixed, thx