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How to ask a good question

If you are linked here, likely you had a question that was ignored by helpers. Normally, you would get at least one response after posting it for 12 hours. If you don't, consider improving the quality of your question or find a better place to ask.

To be fair. Helpers are humans and under no obligations whatsoever to help with any particular question. For bad questions, it's highly likely that they will simply skip them and spend time on good questions instead.

Put some effort into writing a good question is the respect you should give to the person who answers your question.

Wrong place

If you ask highly specific questions, especially questions that are highly related to a particular service (e.g. how to deploy an app on X), then no matter how good and detailed your question is, people might not answer it as they are not familiar with the topic you're asking.

You miss all the shots you don't take, so feel free to ask in the Next.js server as long as it is related to Next.js, but we cannot guarantee you will get any answers at all. Therefore, also check out the support communities of the service to ask there.

Messy code blocks and message formatting

Sending your code as raw text is very bad. Most helpers very rarely actually copy the code to their local machine and try to run it or manually format the code; they simply look at the code, "mentally" parse it and try to find problems. Hence, a poorly formatted message will make it extremely hard to parse code and figure out what's wrong. Please read this guide about formatting your message to learn how to make your message prettier.

Sending code as a screenshot or a photo, though is not as bad, is also discouraged. While most questions are answered without the helpers ever copying and pasting the code for testing in a local machine, there are instances where such a thing is necessary. In such cases, a screenshot or a photo is useless, since the helper cannot copy it. Just format the code in plain text following the above link.

Also note that if your message is too long that Discord requires you to send it as an attachment, you will have to shorten it. There is a very high chance that helpers will simply ignore any questions that are too long to read. Also, if you send a question as a file attachment, it cannot be read easily on Discord Mobile, hence lowering the chance someone can read answer your question.

Read the documentation

Don't misunderstand this, we are willing to help beginners. However, we are not your personal GPT. Please search for existing solutions or read the Next.js documentation before asking your question.

Super long code blocks/examples

Helpers don't have all the time in the world, so we are likely to skip questions that are too long. Shorten the question, remove all the unnecessary parts like "Thanks in advance" or "I'm just a beginner", reduce the code to a minimal form or a minimal reproduction repository are good ways to make your question more likely to be answered.

This is important so we will state it again. If you find yourself posting so much code that they don't fit inside a laptop screen, it's extremely likely your question will just be ignored. Please, shorten the code and/or make a minimal repository.

Lack of details and explanations

Asking questions without providing any details, like ("Why it is not working?????" or "pls help me"). We cannot magically know what is wrong if you don't let us know the necessary information. If you don't know what information is needed, just give as much as you can.

For questions about facing bug/errors, if possible please provide a minimal reproducible repository (can be under the form of a GitHub repository, a CodeSandbox or a similar format) so that we can help you. See also this question.

Always elaborate on your question, nobody knows what you mean by "Not working" or "Nothing happens". Describe the expected behaviour, and the actual behaviour you're getting.

In addition, you can provide some contexts, such as what've you done so far. This helps us indicate the cause of your problem.

Bump the question

If you posted in the #help-forum channel, you can bump your thread by sending a random message, so that it appears at the top of the forum list. That way, the possibility that someone see your thread is increased.

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