How to Ask for Help with Tapestry

["Howard M. Lewis Ship" <hl...@comcast.net>]

If you are having problems with your Tapestry application, don't understand
the documentation, need help ...please contact us on the user mailing list
(tapestry-user@jakarta.apache.org).  We want to help, to grow the community,
to fix anything broken in the framework.

As the volume of traffic on the mailing lists increase, "bad" messages are
going to get ignored!  If you have a problem and are seeking resolution it
is vitally important that you play by the rules:

1) Tapestry is free.  Nobody owes you anything.  

Our desire to grow and support the community is great, but we're all
sacrificing family time, play time, time with our friends, spouses and kids
to contribute to the project ... so if we have a low level of frustration
for poorly written, undocumented help requests, so be it.

2) Do not e-mail individual team members!  

Use the lists and only the lists.  Getting e-mail just pisses us off (well,
me anyway), and a spam filter may eat the message anyway.   We want to help,
but we're not your personal help desk.  In addition, questions and
responses need to be on the list to be archived, so that the NEXT person has
a resource before contacting the list.

3) Be polite. 

Mark Fleury can get away with being an asshole (just once), but you can't. 

4) Do your research.  

There's a lot of Tapestry documentation.  Did you read it?  Did you look at
the code?  Did you use the debugger to step through problem areas? Did you
check the archives at 
http://news.gmane.org/thread.php?group=gmane.comp.java.tapestry.user ?

5) Provide information.  

You've seen the Tapestry Exception page.  Use it!  Messages like "My page
broke" are asking US to do YOUR work.  The first step is to cut-and-paste
the exception report into your mail.  All that information can be a very
precise description of the what and why of your problem.

You can generally expect that our first request will be for copies of the page
template, page specification and Java class. Why not just include those
first? ... we'll be less frustrated and you'll get a faster response.

6) Understand how to ask questions properly.

Please read the following BEFORE posting a help request to the list:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

--
Howard M. Lewis Ship
Creator, Tapestry: Java Web Components
http://jakarta.apache.org/tapestry
http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/sandbox/hivemind/
http://javatapestry.blogspot.com


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