I have been around the freeCodeCamp forum for a long time. I remember when freeCodeCamp had their old forum and then shut it down because it was not doing too well. Then, Discourse came along and Quincy Larson got the forum back up and going using that platform. Needless to say, it has been successful in driving productive discussion ever since.

The forum is a great way to get help with coding problems if the question to your problems are presented in a way that is subject to a good response. I have witnessed bad questions on the forum. I have also seen good questions that were not presented to the reader in an organized way which unfortunately resulted in them not receiving good feedback. Lastly, I have seen completely obliterated questions that had no substance and are one sentence long.

The goal of every question on a forum is to receive the best response as possible. An example of a “best” response is a response that answers your question in complete detail with everything that you need to move forward.

In order to get a good answer to your question, you have to present your question in a way that has substance and that will give the person reading your topic all of the information needed to provide an informative, helpful response.

Today, I am going to give you some tips that will help you get more information and quick response within the freeCodeCamp forum. So, sit back and relax.

Breaking It Down

Now, in order to see where we can improve we need to look at the contents of a forum topic. For people that may be new to the forum, a topic is simply an individual post that you can create on the forum. Here is an example of a topic that I created.

Every topic contains a title and a body. For those of you who are like me, who tend to be more visual, here you go:

showing title and body when creating a topic

Title

We want topic titles to be as descriptive as possible but short and to the point. However, do not put every little detail in your title. Save the details for the body of the topic. You want to make sure that you are not too bland when creating a topic.

Let’s assume that I am working on an Angular application that has a simple user registration form. We are wanting the form to take a username as well as a password and save it to the database when the user clicks the create button. But, when you click the create button you are getting a warning in the console that says ‘method not found’.

So, let us pretend that we want to go to the freeCodeCamp forum and see if we can’t get help with this error that is being logged to the console when we click the “Create Users” button.

A lot of people will rush to the forum and create a topic with the title of “error when clicking button” needless to say, you would not put that as your title. That is not descriptive and quite frankly it is annoying because you are not putting in the effort that you are expecting others to apply in order to solve your problem.

A better title would be “Angular Method Not Found When Clicking Button”

This gives the reader a lot more information than our previous title. With that title, I know what framework and language you are using as well as the error (good titles are wonderful for SEO too).

Before clicking on the forum post I already have an idea of how to fix your problem and what is causing it. This is good because most of the traffic that is driven to your post will be from people that feel confident they can help with your issue. Which will lead to you getting what you want, a good response.

Don’t Go Crazy

Look, I know programming is exciting but releasing all that happy energy within the title of a forum topic is not the place. This is easy to do, especially if you are frustrated, but keep your composure.

~~~Help With Error!!!!! Please!!!!

With a topic title like that, you are going to have people clicking on the topic and not really having an idea of what is inside. This is going to waste their time and also yours because it decreases your chance of getting a good, detailed, helpful response. Also, it looks like spam to forum moderators.

The Body

I know, I know, there is no such thing as a bad question. If you refer to my other readings, you will see that I always encourage people to ask questions if they do not understand something. Don’t let this section of the reading turn you off from asking questions because if you do not ask questions then you will not grow as a developer. Let this be an encouragement to better present your questions, and a learning lesson as to what not to do when asking a question.

This is somewhat of a checklist you can read over just before your question is made public to the rest of the world. When typing your question into the body of the topic, keep these three key concepts in mind.

Links — Did you find any links helpful during your Google search of the issue you were having? If you found links that almost helped you solve your problem then include them in the body. Be sure that they are working and resolve to the site that you expected them to resolve to. These links will come handy when other campers are reviewing your topic and trying to help you with the issue at hand. For example:

example of adding a link to the boddy and referencing it with good context

Syntax — If you are going to show syntax in the body of your topic make sure that it is properly styled. You can highlight your code in the body and click the html (</>) button to format the code so that it is presented to the person reading your topic as if they were looking at it directly in a code editor. This will also allow them to copy and past your code directly if they need to. For example:

clicking the format button will format your code so it is pretty!

CodePen — If you can provide a working copy of your application, that would be wonderful. This way they can run your code without having to go through the brutal steps of setting up an environment on their local machine just to try and fix your problem. Most people will probably stop halfway through the setup of their local environment and just move on to whatever it is they were doing until you introduced them to your application error.

Help me help you solve your problem. The less work I have to do to replicate your problem, the faster I can problem solve for you.

What Makes a Good Question?

The key to producing a good question is the steps you take before asking the question. As a programmer, you are going to have to rely on your own skill of doing research and solving your own problems. That means taking the time to:

Search — be sure to use all of the abundant resources out on the internet to see if there is another developer out there that is having the same problem as you. If you see someone asking a question similar to the one you are about to ask, most likely there is already a solution that you can refer to. Searching before asking the question saves you so much time because it is quicker and easier than typing up a detailed post about the issue that you are having.

— be sure to use all of the abundant resources out on the internet to see if there is another developer out there that is having the same problem as you. If you see someone asking a question similar to the one you are about to ask, most likely there is already a solution that you can refer to. Searching before asking the question saves you so much time because it is quicker and easier than typing up a detailed post about the issue that you are having. Record — if you see problems that are similar to the one you are having but that are not exactly the issue you were experiencing, provide details about those so you can refer to them in your post. Don’t just copy and paste a bunch of stuff because you don’t want to give your reader a brain aneurysm. Actually take time to put it together so that is easy to follow and read.

— if you see problems that are similar to the one you are having but that are not exactly the issue you were experiencing, provide details about those so you can refer to them in your post. Don’t just copy and paste a bunch of stuff because you don’t want to give your reader a brain aneurysm. Actually take time to put it together so that is easy to follow and read. Present — last but not least, we want to take all of the information we have gathered and put it together so that it is presented in a readable, understanding way. Don't go crazy and write a spin off of Game of Thrones, but make it informative, quick, and too the point. Pretend like you are pitching your startup idea to one of the investors on shark tank.

If you need more inspiration on how to write a good question, check Stack Overflow. They follow strict rules when asking questions to make sure they are clear and concise; That is what makes Stack Overflow such a valuable site. You can apply their concepts to pretty much any question that you are asking.

Thanks for reading. If you have thoughts on this, be sure to leave a comment.

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