This post will contain a few guidelines for what you can do to get better help from us. Let's start with the obvious ones:

- Use regular language. A spelling mistake or two isn't anything I'd complain about, but 1337-speak, all-lower-case-with-no-punctuation or huge amounts of run-in text in a single paragraph doesn't make it easier for us to help you.

- Be verbose. We can't look in our crystal bowl and see the problem you have, so describe it in as much detail as possible.

- Cut-and-paste the problem code. Don't retype it into the post, do a cut-and-paste of the actual production code. It's hard to debug code if we can't see it, and this way you make sure any spelling errors or such are caught and no new ones are introduced.

- Post code within code tags, like this [ code ]your code here[ /code ].(make sure to remove the spaces.) This will display like so:

Code:

lol

- Please, post the relevant code. If the code is large and complex, give us a link so we can see it in action, and just post snippets of it on the boards.

- If the code is on an intranet or otherwise is not openly accessible, put it somewhere where we can access it.

- Tell us any error messages from the JavaScript console in Firefox or Opera. (If you haven't tested it in those browsers, please do!)

- If the code has both HTML/XML and JavaScript components, please show us both and not just part of it.

- If the code has frames, iframes, objects, embeds, popups, XMLHttpRequest or similar components, tell us if you are trying it locally or from a server, and if the code is on the same or different servers.

- We don't want to see the server side code in the form of PHP, PERL, ASP, JSP, ColdFusion or any other server side format. Show us the same code you send the browser. That is, show us the generated code, after the server has done it's thing. Generally, this is the code you see on a view-source in the browser, and specifically NOT the .php or .asp (or whatever) source code.