In general, your post will get a good answer if you’ve remembered to do the following:
- Always search for existing answers first.
- Provide as much information and context as possible.
- Format your code.
- Follow the Community Guidelines.
- Reference Additional Resources
Before Starting a Topic, Search for Existing Answers
Before you start a new topic, check existing posts and use Google to see if your questions have already been addressed. This will very often give you an immediate answer! Cryptic error messages are particularly well suited search queries to Google - many others will have had the same problem.
Provide Information and Context
Categorize and Tag
Choose the correct category by language and tag with the course section name.
Context is critical for solving coding problems. Before you post your question, remember that the most visible part of your post is the title. Make that title as useful and descriptive as possible! A great title is usually the difference between something people click on and something people scroll past.
- Ex: A good title: “Dasmoto Project: how do I include my images?”
- Ex: A title that needs work: “im stuck help plzzz”
Now on to the body of your post. If your question stems from an example or problem posed in a course, please post a link to the page . That way, we can see the full instruction set, and can have some understanding as to just what the instructor was trying to accomplish. Please note that a full link is required: " Simply referring to the lesson by name is not sufficient to get you the help we want to get you.
If you have a question about a coding exercise or troubleshooting your code, include your code. This makes it even easier for other users to understand what may be going wrong.
If you’re getting an error message, include the error message.
Finally, explain what you were attempting to do and how - your thought process and approach.
Format Your Code
Codecademy Discuss posts are parsed with Markdown, which allows for easy formatting of code and text. Please note that code posted in the form of a screenshot is difficult to read and work with. When your code is formatted as outlined here, your code will be much easier to read, and can be copied-and-pasted for testing.
When pasting in code, remember that it needs to be escaped by wrapping it in backticks (the ` key, found beneath the esc button on your keyboard) like this:
```
def hello():
print("Hello world!")
```
Which looks like:
def hello():
print("Hello world!")
Just pasting the same code in will come out this way:
def hello():
print(“Hello world!”)
Yikes! That’s not only harder to read, but if you tried to run it, it wouldn’t work! Yes, formatting is that important for code.
See this topic for more details.
Follow Community Guidelines
As always, follow the Community Guidelines. Please treat this discussion forum and your fellow users with respect.
Reference Additional Resources
Read up on How to Use the Codeacademy Forums and Quick Tips for Using the Forums.
Remember…
Writing a good post or asking a good question are key to being a valuable contributor in the forums community, vital skills for anyone who wants to code (even professional developers)… and crucial to getting accurate and fast responses to your questions.