By leetamus on

Hi all

I'm used of doing all the coding myself when building websites so I'm finding it a bit difficult when I run into problems with my Drupal site. Having to rely on the community to assist with problems is weird for me and I find most of the time nobody responds to my questions. As a result, my drupal sites suffer and are basically unusable until some kind drupal ninja points me in the right direction.

Drupal seems fine for kicks and giggles but hardly suitable within a professional environment. When things go wrong I'm left to blindly troubleshoot someone else's code which isn't very effective.

I'm no stranger to forums. I understand that being specific with your issues and thankful to those that help you will get you a quicker and more useful response. But it seems like within the the Drupal community the majority of questions go unanswered... so my question is this - What can I do to increase the chances of getting help? Do I need to sprinkle my posts with magic dust?

In my experience using forums if you ask a vague question or try to get people to do the work for you people will at least post that you're a noob or tell you to do some research, but here you don't even get that. I'm left wondering if my questions are to vague or too complex or what. kinda hard to figure all this out when the community I rely on is so seemingly unhelpful... is this just the way it is here or am I just not asking the right questions?

Thanks all!
Leet

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

JonMB’s picture

JonMB commented

Hi Leet,

I am using many Drupal sites in a professional environment. I've run into many issues and have received help from the forum on most of them. I'm not sure why you are having an opposite experience.

I often include screenshots in my questions to help people visualize what I am trying to do. That might help. Good luck!

dman’s picture

dman commented

I'm sure you are no stranger to the forum guidelines and the troubleshooting guide.
The killer feature for me that distinguishes slap-head questions or too-hard-basket ones from one worth following up is

demonstrated ability to do your own troubleshooting

If you've listed the first three obvious steps you've tried or places you've looked, then your problem looks like a more interesting challenge and you sound like someone worth helping. Both these factors are important in attracting useful help.

Nowadays I basically skip over most posts that don't describe at least a few of the steps they took in fixing their own problems.

Also, it's hard to get involved when someone is being cagey about their actual task. You're not going to hook help by keeping secrets. If you can't supply an URL or a screenshot to illustrate just what you are doing, then you'd better paint a pretty picture with the words or your task just isn't fun enough for random strangers to spend time fixing for you. But providing an URL is always best.

.dan.
if you are asking a question you think should be documented, please provide a link to the handbook where you think the answer should be found.
| http://www.coders.co.nz/ |

.dan. is the New Zealand Drupal Developer working on Government Web Standards

bwv’s picture

bwv commented

Excellent post... this should be bookmarked somewhere.
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http://www.bwv810.com
http://davidhertzberg.com

I am a writer, researcher and solo drupal freelancer.
Je peux communiquer en français. / Я могу общаться на русском языке.

dman’s picture

dman commented

well, I actually wrote it up ... in slightly less personal terms a while ago.
But *sigh* ... the newbies never read it.
Maybe that 'motivation' bit could be added, I guess. I do like to explain why things work :-)

.dan.
if you are asking a question you think should be documented, please provide a link to the handbook where you think the answer should be found.
| http://www.coders.co.nz/ |

.dan. is the New Zealand Drupal Developer working on Government Web Standards

leetamus’s picture

leetamus commented

wow dan thanks that article is SUPER helpful for me! cheers.

leetamus’s picture

leetamus commented

Hey thanks guys, really appreciate your insights. Outlining the steps taken so far is a great tidbit which now seems obvious ;) Same with providing the issue in such a way that makes for an enjoyable challenge for the community.

My problem is that I'm very new to Drupal and many times I don't even know where to start looking for solutions so my questions may seem somewhat vague. Being that I'm mainly a Flash Developer I spend alot of time on flashkit helping beginners. When I see a post where the poster clearly doesn't understand what they're doing I'll post some function names for them to look up or point them in the right direction. Helping beginners makes for beginners that will some day help more beginners. Saying 'I've never seen this problem before' or 'provide more detail' is actually really helpful to us noobs and only takes a second.

Here's an example of one of my posts. If anyone could critique it I would be very thankful!
http://drupal.org/node/296814

dman’s picture

dman commented

*sigh*

.dan. is the New Zealand Drupal Developer working on Government Web Standards

avskip’s picture

avskip commented

I have been using Drupal since version 4.6 was first introduced. I've found a lot of helpful people on here over time and have had my fair share of issues and help posts ignored. Not all, but enough to where I'm getting more of an "If I can't fix it then don't use it" attitude. Before using a module I also check to see how responsive the maintainer has been in answering any issues in the queue.

I do spend time reading tutorials on various items and some modules I won't use until I see they are going into core or I see they are being migrated to the next Drupal version. If it's not being migrated I just do without if I can't do it otherwise. To this day I'm still afraid of using the CCK module as I was bitten with Flexinode when it was dropped.

I've also gone through some tutorials on PHP and MySQL so I'm not completely out of it when I have to do something. Not an expert by any means though.

Another thing that I've started doing is answering myself on here. That may initially sound strange, but it allows others that may have something similar with the path I took to fix whatever was going on.

I've also started using the Site Notes module. It's functionality that I think should be in core. It's a very handy notation source to help track mods and updates that type thing.

I also created a Drupal Custom Search Engine on Google that goes through a LOT of Drupal based sites. You can access it at http://google.com/coop/cse?cx=009554137233738687718%3Aqnmms6jjskg - it's currently searching these sites: projex.com, groups.drupal.org, ubercart.org, drupalecommerce.org, 2bits.com, bryght.com, api.drupal.org, cvs.drupal.org, lists.drupal.org, devbee.com, drupal.org

I also read the posts that are in some of the email lists at lists.drupal.org - in particular I find the support list (http://lists.drupal.org/listinfo/support) to be more responsive than the forum site. I think it's because of less traffic.

The one thing I have noticed is a decreased interest in helping others on here and much more interest of moving forward to the next version level of Drupal. It's almost as if it's becoming more exclusively a development site vice a development/support site.

Hope something helped!
Skip

leetamus’s picture

leetamus commented

Thanks Skip, I bookmarked your links. The support list in particular seems like a good place to explore. ;)

onejam’s picture

onejam commented

Or try in the IRC channels:

http://drupal.org/irc

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