Support forum etiquette

[Symon]

When asking for help and support or advice it makes sense to :--


1. Always give a link to the forum or problem.

2. Make the title of your topic Revellent to your question.

3. Ask in a friendly manor using correct English.

4. To use the search on here and HOWTODOIT.

5. Have patience when waiting for a reply.

6. Do not use pm`s begging for support or for us to join or admin your forum.

7. "It doesnt work " Helps no one we need to know what you have done and what guide you followed if any at all. Help us To Help You


How ever far to many people are just being to damm lazy at the moment, they want answers to half asked questions without spending the time to search.

Some of the topic titles are a joke "help now" and "please read" and "Help quick" this will not help anyone that uses the search that may have had the same problem.

Then they think by posting huge codes will will just edit it for them and give it back.

The support forum is not here to make your forum for you, it is here to help and assist in any troubles you may have, however some people seem to think they can demand support and all of our attention all the time.

Forum`s do not become successful due to the amount of hacks and add on`s you can cram on them, so concentrate on the posts on your forum.

The golden rule is to "help us Help you" by being lazy does not help you or us.

No one gains knowledge by copy and pasting.

Moan Over


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http://www.saynoto0870.com/

[CodyT07]

7. Do not post e-mails or anything that should be private, on the forum. Spam bots will get it and spam your e-mail.
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Number 92, Right Guard Offensive Line. Smyrna Bull Dog FOOTBALL

[admin (no pm's please)]

I'd also add that the support forums role is made difficult by the fact the unique to all free forums system we do not keep our members in a restrictive playpen, we give our members full template editing capabilities

This creates a whole new category of issues where people have broken one of 100's of original templates in ways that are very difficult to fix, as we have no idea what has been done to break them.

Whilst the support forum does have 100's of example of us helping with this situation (and I really admire the effort some of our members put in to figuring out some of these impossible puzzles) we have to be clear that there is no way a free support forum can guarantee the time to bale people out of template issues.

If you edit templates.

(1)
Use the editor account for testing the edits, do not edit the live template.

(2)

Take a backup using a spare template slot (that is what they are there for) of even saving files to your own PC with cut and paste.

(3)

Follow instructions exactly and if you don't understand, DON'T do. We get plenty of people who can't understand where an edit goes, and try putting it in a the top or bottom of a file


(4)

Try and understand the file you are editing and the edits being made. The files may not be "English", but they are full of information that will help anyone understand quite a bit of what is going on, if they think it through.


(5)

The files are also in "html" and must follow the html language.
There are tutorials for html all over the net and it does not take very long to learn. To try and make complex edits without bothering to learn basic html is a waste of everyones time.
A key point here is tables, everything in templates is in html tables which have a mere 4 tag words associated with them, the 4 opening tags and their closing tags must follow a strict but simple order that takes minutes to learn. A large chunk of the issues we see in template editing have the tags in the wrong order!
When we see this, it is easy to say you have gone wrong "THERE" but still much harder to say what should have been done. If someone slings paint over the Mona Lisa anyone can see where the damage is, but they won't be able to recreate what is now hidden!
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