If I may I would like to add to this topic by stressing why it is so important that you structure your questions correctly - from naming the topic appropriately down to providing as much of a detailed analysis of your problem as you can.
Naming your topic appropriatelyAs one of the few who actually visits this place to answer questions and help the user's, I find it quite annoying sometimes at just how poorly some of the topic titles are. I often find myself having to rename them completely and this can be strange for people who are looking for the topic because it will have swapped titles.
The reason I do so is because mainly most people who post here not use the appropriate tags in the prefix of the topic title (as described in the read me topic at the top of this very board). The second reason is that in order for someone who may be knowledgable on the given nature of your problem to offer their help... it makes sense to try and summarise your problem as best you can in the topic title - or at least state what aspect of flash your problem depicts.
A lot of times I will add a footnote to the page noting that I have changed the topic title to something more accurate. It's easier for people like me to be able to skim through the requests and questions and get a rough idea about the type of problems that you all are experiencing. So please, name your titles accordingly...
------------------------------------------------------------------Explaining your problem or requestAnother problem is that when explaining their problem in a post, people tend to be very unclear about what they want and what they are trying to achieve... which makes it almost impossible a lot of the time for people to provide adequate help.
You need to think about your problem and how best to word it, maybe you could include a description of your overall goal or actions that you have taken which have caused you to run into these problems. Even better, why not post any code or flash files you have already created for other user's to get a better idea of what is is you aim to accomplish.
I myself know how hard it is sometimes to explain a problem in which you know little about but sometimes, explaining what went wrong and how it went wrong is the first step to getting better help... a lot of the people who offer help will then go on to explain why your problem occured in the first place and go on to explain how to prevent it in future - well anyone worth their salt when it comes to helping people out.
Take time to word your posts adequately, making sure you use proper spelling and punctuation as best you can - this also allows other members to read your posts more clearly.
------------------------------------------------------------------Breaking up text and using tagsOne of my personal pet hates are what I refer to as text walls, a text wall occurs when a whole post is bunched up together in one huge sentence without the use of paragraphs... when I see it it discourages me from wanting to actually read it.
Please, please, please refrain from using text walls, i'm sure it annoys a lot of members and some people will refuse to read your post that otherwise could have helped you out.
It is also a good idea to use certain BBCode tags - namely the Code tags. This splits coding such as ActionScript up into its own little box similar to the one below which makes it easier to spot where the coding in a larger post is:
Not only that but it looks neater and is easier to skim through if your looking for specific blocks of code.
------------------------------------------------------------------Searching before postingA lot of duplicate questions get asked on the forum, a lot of which are just worded differently but both require the same answer... therefore it is advsed that before you post a new topic asking for help - you check the forum for similar requests.
Google, Yahoo, Dogpile, Live search and other such search engines also provide good links to help elsewhere if you word your searches correctly.
Before the forums got upgraded from PHPBB2 to PHPBB3, there was a mass of tutorials written by me and other members ranging from basic to expert flash tutorials. It is advised that you also look through that too and see if a tutorial or question there exists, the link can be found here:
http://archives.mcleodgaming.com/viewfo ... 8038532d71More specifically the tutorials I wrote can be found here:
http://archives.mcleodgaming.com/viewtopic.php?t=5578However because the link listed above links to the old forums which have been locked. I cannot edit the URL's - therefore you will need to replace the word 'forums' in the URL to 'archives' in order for it to work. Like so:
------------------------------------------------------------------That concludes my addition to Nac's post on constructing better questions... I may add more to this later on though. Please take note of everything that is mentioned and you'll find that you will recieve a lot more in terms of quality help.
Thanks for your time...