This is not fair on them and we instruct our experts to ignore any such PMs completely, there are also some very good reasons why it is not a good idea:

• You have no guarantee that the expert you have PM'd knows anything about the subject you are asking about.
• You have no guarantee that the expert in question hasn't just gone on holiday for 4 weeks to Hawaii resulting in a delay to the answer to your question.
• If you post the question in the forums then everyone gets to see it. This means that there is a far higher chance that someone who already knows the answer will see the question than if you just ask 1 person.
• It's good to spread questions and knowledge. Remember if you have a question then it is likely that someone else in the world has a very similar question. By asking your question in the open forum and getting a reply there the information is available for everyone to read and learn from.

• Posting in a language other than English. This is a multinational forum and as such uses English as its language as it is the international language of business. If your English is not so good then please say so and the experts will try to make some allowance for this.
• Bad/foul language and swearing.
• Personal Insults or Attacks
• Posting your own or anyone else’s email address (this is for your own security)
• Posting links to a site that contains inappropriate content or content that would break the posting guidelines if posted directly on Bytes.com, specifically but not limited to bad/foul language or sexually explicit sites.
• Posting links to a forum that is in competition with Bytes.com IT/Developer Network.
• Putting your entire post in bold and/or italic. These are meant for placing emphasis on specific bits of your post not the entire message.
• Using capital letters for your entire post. Use of capitals is generally considered to be shouting and therefore rather rude.
• Posts containing any information or questions on how to hack or crack or produce code with some other malicious intent. Note however that security topics whose intent is generally not malicious but rather is discussing methods of improving security are allowed.
• Posting an attachment that contains binary code (raw or zipped) of any nature. There is no need to post or attach anything other than source code which should generally be text
• Posts whose content is religious in nature
• Posts whose content is political in nature
• Posting Spam (see "What is Spam?")
• Flooding any forum (see "What is Flooding?")

• We want this site to grow, many of our new members find the site using a search engine, by using a good thread title you will help us grow the site by helping us get better search engine rankings.
• Using a good title will benefit you too because other members of the forum will be less likely to skip over your thread and it allows the experts to quickly scan through the forum for questions they know the answer to.
• If the threads are well titled it allows other users to easily see if there have been any threads that could be relevant to their own current problem.
• It is in everybody's best interests to post properly titled threads as the more time the moderators have to spend on managing titles the less time they have available to give answers to the questions posed.

• What makes a Good Thread Title
• What you should avoid putting in a Thread Title

• Post your question in a relevant forum
• Make sure you are not posting in an Articles section
• Give the relevant Platform, OS and Version information
  • In the C/C++ forum this might be Intel/Windows/MSVC++ 6.0 or StrongArm/ThreadX/Greenhills C/C++
  • In Access it might just be the version of Access you are using 97, 2003 etc.
• Give as much detail as possible When you post a question or problem, express the situation clearly and concisely and include all relevant information, code used, data used, result expected, result achieved and any error codes or messages that you get as a result.
• Use Clear English to write your question in if possible, try to avoid using abbreviations
• Do not use leet speak or text speak, they are not Clear English
• Make use of the available formatting tags in the forum Use CODE tags around your code unless you are posting a single line of code in which case it is acceptable to omit them:
  • [code]..code goes here..[/code]
  • [code=php] ..php code goes here.. [/code]
  • [code=c] ..C like code goes here.. [/code]
  • [code=html] ..html code goes here.. [/code]
  This will preserve white space and use a mono-spaced font making the code easier to read.
• Do not ask people to reply by email or follow up answers with a PM
• Please don't say that a problem is urgent if it's not. If your problem is time sensitive, please give specific time frames e.g. In 3 days, within 24 hours.
• Please try to read your own post after you've posted it. If you can't make any sense of it, it's a fair bet that our experts will struggle and waste time just trying to understand what you're trying to say. Also, if you get bored when you're half-way through reading it because it rambles on endlessly, how will our experts fare?
• If you wish to post a question do not post it in a discussion created by someone else unless it is about exactly the same problem. Please start a new discussion.

• Full list of Code Tag Supported Languages
• Access Forum Specific Guidelines

• If it appears that the question has just been pasted directly from a text book or coursework assignment our moderators have been instructed to meet this with a set response. This is a pre-written message asking you to make some attempt at the assignment yourself before asking questions about specific problems and referring you to this FAQ.
• Do NOT post your complete source code. Remember, you found this site, so can your professors and tutors and they are likely to take a dim view if you hand in something that appears to be copied from this site. In most academic institutes the minimum response to copying of assignments is a 0 mark for the assignment in question. If you post your entire code your professor will not know it was your work, you may be penalised for copying from yourself.
• If an expert requests that you provide more of your code then you can PM it to them, however please do not PM them your code unless requested.
• Acceptable questions that students can ask are on functionality and theory or syntax corrections in small posted code snippets.
• Please make sure you have asked an actual question worded in English outside of the text of your assignment that you have posted.

• If you need to see a students full code for any reason request that it be forwarded to you directly by PM. However when replying try to word your reply so that it can post back to the forum.
• Remember students are supposed to be learning. Posting complete solution replies is not helping them to learn the process of programming whatever language they use. In addition should their professor or tutor be watching and they use your solution they will likely get into trouble. You won't have helped them in any way. You need to act as a tutor, helping the poster to the understanding of how to solve the problem, not solving it for them.
• If anyone does post a full code solution then the solution will be edited by the moderator appropriately and the person will be referred to these guidelines.

1. It makes it very hard for people to answer you especially if there are answers happening in all the threads you have started because they have to read 2 or more threads in order to see what has already been said.
2. It swamps the forum with your problem resulting in less attention for the other threads.

While you're in a forum posting a question, why not scan a few of the other questions - you may be surprised at how often you'll know an answer, and that is what makes a forum like this. You're welcome to participate in any discussions and even if your suggestion doesn't work you'll still learn something when you discover why.

It's astonishing how often you'll learn something from a complete beginner, often just because our experts are inclined to look for complicated answers sometimes. Also most "experts" learned a lot of their knowledge from forums just like this one.

When you are posting a response please try to following these guidelines

• Be patient with learners. Remember we are all learning one thing or another.
• Always try to assist the original poster (OP) in solving their problems in such a manner that they also benefit and learn from the exercise.
• Do not hesitate to point out better methods or technologies (if available) than the ones being used by the OP.
• Do not offer programming help through emails or private messages. Help offered on the forum is better because it benefits everyone else facing similar problems.
• Always post code inside the appropriate code, php or html tags.

Posting Complete Solutions

When a person asks for help, they want help in understanding the problem. Posting the completed program code without explaining concepts or useful tools does not help that person learn and, thus, violates the first and second guideline above.

This doesn't mean you shouldn't try and write the solution yourself. You will be better equipped to help someone and help them understand the ideas if you have a thorough understanding of the problem and solution yourself and solving the problem yourself is an excellent way of doing gaining that understanding. Just don't give them the answer - help them to discover the answer on their own, they just may come up with a better answer that you hadn’t though of.

For example if the following question where to appear in the C/C++ forum

Write a program that produces this pattern

*****
 ****
  ***
   **
    *
Then the following reply
 
#include "stdio.h"

int main(int argc, char **argp)
{
    int i, j;

    for(i=0; i<5; i++)
    {
        for(j=0; j<i; j++)
        {
            putchar(' ');
        }

        for(; j<5; j++)
        {
            putchar('*');
        }

        putchar('\n');
    }

    return 0;
}
is not as useful as it seems.  Yes you have answered the question and give the OP an answer to submit to their course tutor but you have not in anyway done anything to explain why this is the solution to the problem or what the various language constructs do.

Recommending good books to each other is valid and useful thing to do. However when you want to do this please post the book's details

• Title
• Author
• ISBN

Please do not post a link to a place where the book is sold, this will be considered spam and treated accordingly (the link/post will be removed, your account may be banned).