This was Exilement's announcement a few months ago, since people have started to commit the same mistakes over and over, I decided that it would be a good idea to sticky this, and before you make any thread/post please read this:

The General Help section's quality has been pretty terrible lately, to the point where intervention is becoming necessary.

General Help is constantly plagued with threads asking questions that can easily be answered by a visit to the Tutorial Section, or Zed's Have Questions? Here Are The Answers! thread, or even a simple search in Google.

This sort of laziness is ridiculous considering the effort put into the resources we have here. For years, ordinary members like you have spent countless hours creating the vast collection of tutorials and guides on this forum. It's about time we start using them.

That's only one of the many problems I've noticed lately. In an attempt to stop them, the following guidelines and rules are now in effect:

If you want to ask a question:
  • Do NOT make the subject "NEED HELP PLEASE", or any variation of that. The point of a thread title is to give everyone an idea of what the thread is about. Summarize your problem in the subject.
  • If you haven't put any effort into solving your problem, then why would you expect us to do it for you? Scarecrow explained what you should do before asking a question.
  • Be as specific and detailed as possible. Explain exactly what you need help with, and give any relevant details that you can think of. Put as much effort into asking your question as you'd expect in an answer.


If you want to answer a question:
  • Make sure you actually know what you're talking about. Especially with computer-related issues, blind guesses can make the problem even worse. More likely, you're just wasting their time instead of actually helping them. Don't do it.
  • Actually answer the question. Instead of a detailed explanation that someone can actually use, a lot of answers resemble this: How do I draw an owl?. This is a good example, someone asked how to draw something specific, and the first two answers were essentially "just draw it" with no explanation of how to do it. C'mon, guys.



Failing to follow these guidelines will result in a warning. Infractions will follow for repeat offenses.

Thanks for reading.