Forum Guidelines: Please read before posting!

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#1 Thu, 09/21/2017 - 01:48
Joe
Joe's picture

Forum Guidelines: Please read before posting!

In order to maximize our ability to help as many people as possible, and in order to keep things friendly and fun, we have some forum guidelines that we ask you to follow when posting new topics or commenting. I present them below in a delightful series of short "Do's and Don'ts"

Do

  • Focus! If you have multiple problems, make multiple posts.
  • Include the following: Distro/version, when you installed, steps to cause the problem, any errors you got.
  • Test with a fully updated system before posting a question.
  • Tell us what you've already tried, and what happened (briefly!).
  • Be patient. We are a small team and the work we do here in the forums and on our OSS projects is unpaid volunteer labor.
  • Remember that if your problem is urgent and affecting your business, etc., you can make it urgent to our business by becoming a paying customer.

Don't

  • Don't make zombies. Searching for similar problems is great! But, reviving old posts with new questions is bad.
  • Don't change the subject. One question per topic.
  • Don't panic if your post gets queued for moderation (or if it looks like nothing happened when you submitted). Our spam filter is overly aggressive sometimes, but we'll publish your post as soon as we see it in the queue.
  • Don't mark forum posts private. For one-on-one help, become a paying customer and file tickets in the issue tracker.
  • Don't do bigotry of any sort: racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, etc. You will be banned without warning.
  • Don't be mean. Treat people with respect. We'll give you a warning if you step over the line, but only once.

Bonus Do's

  • Make suggestions below about anything I've missed in this list.
  • Improve your situational awareness by reading a few topics before posting your own questions.

Super Important Do

  • Include your Linux distribution and version!

Thanks for reading!

Thu, 09/21/2017 - 04:17
Jfro

Got it. ;)

though suggestion: if newbie if new installed and having more then one problem you can't know for sure they are standalone problems ( you think yourself i did something (onething/step) wrong and therefore more problems in once.

So what is then better to: Focus! If you have multiple problems, make multiple posts. ?

Or first create in 1post a enumeration as newbie and ask in this post if these pobs could related, talking here about newbies as me, thinking they did something wrong with the installation. ( then go on in the 1 post or if not related in the multiple post if support says so)

This to prevent that with one issue / mistake causing multiple probs you can look over that.

I myself waited more then 1-2 weeks reading here and docs into the probs themselves before posting, thinking myself ok something wrong with what i used ore did , has broken a few things, so summing up all of these and yes in combination with my english probably a mess to read for your support, excuses. uh sofar i will try next (briefly!) ;)

JOE please delete this post of me after reading.

Thu, 09/21/2017 - 18:07 (Reply to #2)
Joe
Joe's picture

I wasn't singling you or anyone else out with this post! You're not the first person to post lengthy problem reports with a lot of unrelated details. It happens every day and has happened for the entire life of the project. ;-)

Use your best judgment to decide when problems are closely related, perhaps caused by one change you made.

There are a few areas where one misconfiguration or problem can cause many problems:

  • DNS and FQDN
  • Reverse DNS and email
  • DNS glue records
  • Low memory
  • DHCP-configured network

There may be some others, but those are the ones that spring to mind.

It may be useful to post those sorts of problems all in one post...but, any one of the problems they cause may be enough to diagnose the problem, and posting a bunch of details about the many problems they can cause only makes it take a lot longer to read and understand what's happening. It's often the case that a bunch of related problems is most easily diagnosed in isolation just because I can't hold multiple complex problems in my head at one time. Give me small problems, and I'll solve them quick. Give me complicated problems and I may not be able to solve them at all, given the time I have available to dedicate to forum posting each day.

When in doubt, err on the side of shorter, simpler, questions. Tell us what went wrong and how you got there for one problem at a time.

--

Check out the forum guidelines!

Thu, 09/21/2017 - 07:18
unborn
unborn's picture

@joe

great post, thanks for this. Most of the users would be very thankful for warning future! Have good day guys.

ps: if possible - please remove from user account - track the forum posts that are marked as 'Access Denied' that would be really plus.

Configuring/troubleshooting Debian servers is always great fun

Thu, 09/21/2017 - 18:12 (Reply to #4)
Joe
Joe's picture

"ps: if possible - please remove from user account - track the forum posts that are marked as 'Access Denied' that would be really plus."

I don't know how to do that, unfortunately. Drupal is supposed to hide unavailable posts in the general case, so it's kinda bug-like that it's showing you things you can't read.

But, I don't think it's a common problem; mostly you won't be on trackable threads unless you have access to them because you had to have access to comment on them. This only changes if a thread is marked private after your reply, which is rare, and we discourage marking anything private (except in the issue tracker where things are now private by default). That actually reminds me I need to add that to the guidelines: No private forum posts! (I, unfortunately, can't disable private forum posts without revealing old private posts which may contain still-sensitive information.)

--

Check out the forum guidelines!

Wed, 10/31/2018 - 05:28
Jfro

Don't know if it maters for the better. To have her a howto or link to that howto, to find what is running on the box versions and so on . Then the ( todo howto) copy and paste to post in every topic start where some have a problem with that box.

Then the version and so more problems to asked first should be solved, and support can going on , before spending "nonsene time" asking to post versions. For example "Adamus" is doing a good job here ;) https://www.virtualmin.com/comment/804415#comment-804415

For log / error log files such links / howto could be handy to. ( sometimes if one does that search in logs they find the error and solution themselves)

Mon, 11/19/2018 - 21:01
sungod
  1. I am running Virtualmin on centos7
  2. Installed Rapissl and checked the installation by using
  3. got the alert : Intermediate certificate missing. RapidSSL RSA CA 2018

  4. Downloaded and installed the Intermediate certificate But I am getting an error when I try to save the file :-

Failed to save CA certificate : flush_file_lines called on non-loaded file /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

Can anyone assist ?

P Nath

Sat, 08/10/2019 - 09:14
Aiman

@joe

when I select Re-Check Configuration: give me the error----- (Virtualmin could not work out the default IPv4 address for virtual servers on your system. You will need to update either the Network interface for virtual addresses or Default virtual server IP address fields on the module configuration page.)

this is the video for you https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u89HJ0pz8bg

pls help me

Aiman2020

Wed, 08/14/2019 - 07:29 (Reply to #8)
RJM Web Design
RJM Web Design's picture

Virtualmin -> System Settings -> Networking Settings -> Default virtual server IPv4 address.

--Richard

Thu, 11/28/2019 - 12:40
Jfro

So i "hate" lot of support questions here on forum without those persons read and follow these guidelines first. ( more and more this happens now lately, support and other forum helpers must guess a lot and first asking also questions that is so depressing...... not done)

Maybe ok somewhere in new forum software this topic more BOLD and...

Also a simple click system when someone didn't follow the guidelines.

Example with predefined texts as: please read our forum guidelines: Post your version, LOG error messages and did you use search.?

I don't want to .. , and think lot off others sighs before then yes or no takes time to yes or no answer, but on what to answer if not knowing more about........?

For this forum software a BUMP in this TOPIC has some effect to have this first in result ( last post) hihi. ;)

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