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Be Specific

Often times I'll see poorly written help requests like this:

___ isn't working, can someone help me?

Your program is broken. It won't let me do ___

I'm having a problem with ___. Help!

These questions don't have enough information for anyone to be able to help you. Pretty much everyone will ask this question next:

Could you provide more information about the problem you're having?

To save everyone's time and effort, you should provide them with all the information you have then and there. When does the problem occur, or what did you do to cause the issue? What do you expect to be happening instead? Is there anything weird you're trying to do that would break things? How much research have to done to try to determine the cause the issue yourself, if any?

When it comes to asking for help, less is not more. Provide all the information as soon as possible so people can help you as fast as possible, instead of having to ask you for more context.

There's also another reason to do this. A well-detailed request for help communicates how much you know about the issue. Compare these two good requests for help:

My code (shown below) isn't quite doing what I expect it to. It's printing ____, while I actually expect it to be printing ____. I've minimized the issue to just this small snippet of 10 lines of code and I think the issue has to do with ____, but I'm not sure.

My code (shown below) isn't printing the right text to the console. Based on the number of times the for-loop runs and the order they run, I expect it to be printing ___, but it's actually printing ___ instead. I suspect it has to do with a missing semi-colon but I'm not exactly sure.

The first request tells people you are more of a beginner at programming, while the second communicates you know what the console is and how your code is interacting with itself. The way someone might help the first person will be different from the second person, but without the context they would never know the difference between the two.