Forum

Lazarus and Freepascal forum is a common place to ask questions and the best place for discussions. It's more user friendly way of communication and might be preferred by beginning users than mailing list.

http://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org

The forum was acting as the welcome page for Lazarus project for a while.

Use code tags

Especially, if you're asking for help.

When you're pasting a big or small chunk of code into the forum. It's by default treated as a normal text. It's not aligned as code should (no fixed font applies). If indentation is used in the code (and it should), it might go wrong, making the code hard to read.

Also, parts of you pasted code might be considered as mark up by the forum engine, causing undesirable look.

A code like this:

Ends up looking like that:

As a result, instead of getting actual help, you might hear requests to "use code tags!". Using code tags is easy. All you need to do is add

[code]

in the beginning of a section of your code and add

[/code]

in the end of the section of your code.

Keep in mind, that once you've made a post and forgot to put code tags, you can "MODIFY" and add them. Just like this:

Once changes are done and you hit "Save", you should see a nice Code section appearing in your post. The code section would show the code with fixed-width font. A smaller box with ability to select code quickly. Your code would not be mistreated as a forum markup as will be shown as it is.

Most importantly, using code tags is yet another form of on-line politeness.