Forum topic submission guidelines

From the vantage point of a user who hasn't ever been to Drupal.org before and who barely knows what a CMS is but has somehow managed to get Drupal installed, there is virtually nothing front and center at Drupal.org, or directly on the pages they post on, to cue them to the fact that paid support people and/or paid developers aren't just eagerly awaiting their support requests. (the natural tendency of some may be to assume, "well, even if this is open source someone must be getting paid!")

An idea for improvement:

Update the create forum page in order to make it more clear, in terms of what a user should expect and/or be responsible for in order to improve their experience and Drupal.orgs forums. The text to do this already exists within on the Tips for posting to the Drupal forum page, which is likely to be unread by a large number of users who will simply skip the link and post their question to the forums.

As an example, here is the current create forum page fused with (slightly shortened for length) langauge from the Forum tips page:

Before posting a forum topic, please search the forums first; chances are your questions has been asked a couple times.

When asking a question, describe the symptoms of your problem, the environment in which it occurs (Drupal version, webserver, database), the research and diagnostics steps you did to try and understand the problem. Be sure to use a detailed, context-specific title for the post as most community members scan titles in deciding what to read. For more information on posting to the forums, please read Tips for posting to the Drupal forums.

Also note that posts that are interesting, complete, well-written and correctly spelled/punctuated are often promoted to our main page.

Please post bug reports and feature requests to the issue queue.

Finally, please remember that while it is very easy to become frustrated when grappling with a problem, remember that Drupal community members donate their time in offering support. People are more likely to respond to posts which ask nicely for assistance over those that demand it or complain. If your post has gone unanswered, perhaps no one that has read your post has the solution to your problem. And if you feel like support response could be better on drupal.org, please donate some of your time, too, to answering support questions. In a volunteer effort, the only way to improve support is for everyone to participate.