Things you should include when posting in the community.

[kgastaldo]

A classic post from Mike Hatfield, Engineering Manager, Client Applications:

There are a number of ways you can help get your questions answered on this community. Please try to adhere to the following guidelines:

1. Do use the Search function to see if your question has already been answered. 
2. Do add the most appropriate category to your question.
3. Don't crosspost the same question to multiple categories or spaces. 
4. Don't use all-caps or unnecessary punctuation in your post title. Choose a title that is descriptive of the issue you are seeing. Good titles will help Community members as they scan the forums looking for topics that are interesting to them. Bad titles--titles that make no sense, titles that that claim to be "Urgent!", or titles in all-caps--are avoided like the plague.
5. Do post as much information about your problem as possible. Be specific about what you are trying to do. Stating problems such as "I have lots of install problems, please help!" is difficult to respond to.
6. Do include the alfresco.log file, the entire exception trace (use a code block), and any error messages you are seeing. And don't forget to provide the specific version (like 4.0.d), edition (Community versus Enterprise), and distribution (WAR-only, binary installer, build-from-source).
7. Do your homework. The Community likes to help people who have shown they have done at least some initial investigation into the problem. Search the community and Jira before posting. Tell us what you've tried so far. What resources have you leveraged? Where in the source code have you looked? Alfresco isn't a black box. It's open source. Roll up your sleeves, dig in, and work up a sweat before you post.
8. Do be patient! Alfresco engineers, partners and other community members are all very busy people and are often helping out in their spare time. "Bumping" a topic after 24 hours will not help you get an answer and, in fact, may prevent you getting an answer as it looks as though somebody has replied.
9. Don't send Private Messages or direct email asking questions, or asking for your topic to be answered quicker.
10. Do use GitHub to report bugs. If you've found a reproducible bug, please raise it in GitHub with as much information as possible so we can reproduce it ourselves.
11. Do update your profile and your signature. Tell us a bit about yourself like who you work for and where you are located. That way, you're more than just a username. Build a rapport with your fellow community members. You might also want to specify your Alfresco version so you don't have to type it every time you post.
12. Do be respectful and courteous in your posts. We all get frustrated sometimes, but profanity, abusive language, and generally negative comments won't get you any answers, and will not be tolerated.
13. Finally, please try to find unanswered questions from other community members and help answer them yourself. These forums can only work if people help each other.

The single most important way to get help, especially for installation problems is: Post your alfresco.log file!
And please don't cut/paste what you think is an exception; often important detail will be removed. If the log file is too big for a forum post, then use any of the free web-based tools and submit a link.

Please also note: Share will not let you log-in if the Explorer application is either not running correctly or running on a port other than 8080 and you haven't told Share where to find it. You must get Explorer (/alfresco) working before attempting to run Share.

Thanks for reading and thank you for choosing Alfresco,
Mike