Proposed procedure to seek help within a discussion group

The idea is to make a positive contribution on the web. We often require help and assistance. We should endeavor to contribute something to the community in return.

Therefore, when having a problem, we do our best to follow the following general principle:

1. Clearly identify what the question/problem is.
2. First, have a look at the Documentation Wiki, at the place where you'd expect to find the answer.
3. If you cannot find the answer anywhere in the wiki, make a note or create a stub of a page at the most appropriate place.
4. Create a new forum topic or discussion thread with your question. Put a link back to the wiki and state that you will update the wiki with any useful reply you may receive.
5. Go back to the wiki and put a link back to the forum topic or the archived discussion thread.
6. As you get answers, go back to the wiki, complete it, make necessary clean-ups and, at last, remove the link to the discussion topic.
7. Thus, at the same time, you would have received help, and you would have contributed something back to the community. Thanks to you, future users will have a better documentation to consult.

If a few people get into this habit here and in every open source project, the quality of the documentation would increase significantly and the work load on the moderators, developers and other admins would diminish. The end users, instead of being a mere consumer of board-based support, would have had an opportunity to contribute a little.