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Asking for Help
Part 3 : Be Specific

By Stephen Chapman, About.com

You need to be as specific as possible when you ask for help with a Javascript problem. Give your post a subject line that describes the type of problem you are having and you are more likely to have people who know how to solve that sort of problem take a look for you. Give your post a subject such as 'Help Needed' or some other non-descriptive subject and many of the forum helpers will deliberately ignore your post because they will assume that you have probably supplied insufficient details for them to solve the problem in an acceptable time.

Make sure that you post a link to the page where the script is installed so that anyone who decides to take a look for you can visit the page and see for themselves what the script is doing. If you are not ready to make the page live on your site because the script doesn't work then upload it temporarily as a separate page and post the link to that.

You also need to clearly state what it is that is not working properly. State what should be happening and what is happening instead. Without knowing what part of the processing it is that you consider is not working right helpers may look at some completely different part of your page and expect to find some way to fix that even though there is nothing wrong with that part of the page. If you can identify the piece of code on the page that is not working properly and post a copy of that code in addition to a link to the page then that is even better since if the error is something simple that actually is in that code then someone may be able to tell you what is wrong without even having to look at your page. Of course the problem may be caused by a conflist with something somewhere completely different than you expect (which is why it is so important to include a link to the page).

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