Difference between revisions of "Forum"

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Revision as of 13:51, 19 June 2016

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

If you're asking for help it is particularly important to format your code so it is clearly shown as code.

The forum treats any code you paste (whether a big or small chunk) as normal text. Default text formatting will be proportionally spaced (not fixed-width) and indentation and alignment of successive lines will be unreliable, making the code hard to read. forum1.PNG

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

A code snippet such as this:

forum2.PNG

...ends up looking like this:

forum3.PNG

As a result, instead of actually getting help, you might only get "use code tags!" responses. Using code tags is easy. All you need to do is add

[code=pascal]

at the start of your code and add

[/code]

at the end of your code.

A shortcut for this is to click the # (code) button when writing your thread text:

forum8.png


If you have already made a post without remembering to insert [code=pascal] and [/code] tags, you can "MODIFY" your post and add them later. Just like this:

forum4.PNG

File:forum9.PNG

forum6.PNG

Once the changes are made and you hit "Save", you should see a nice Code section appearing in your post. The code section shows your code using a fixed-width font. This is placed within a smaller box with a "Select" button that allows you to select just that code section quickly. Your code will not then be misinterpreted as forum markup. It will as will be displayed as the code it is.

forum7.PNG

Most importantly, taking the trouble to use code tags is one way to support on-line politeness.

Share the Outcome

The Forum is a good place to get help with Object Pascal and Lazarus. If you run into trouble and cannot figure out a solution by yourself even after Googling for answers similar problems, the forum is the best place to ask.

You will usually find there are many experienced people reading the Forum who will help you.

But, as soon as you get an answer which you find resolves your problem, please let everyone else know that the proposed solution worked for you.

It's very easy to get overexcited, once things start working again, and you might omit to tell everyone else. Please DON'T forget, because we'd like to know, and anyone else who later runs into the same issue, would also like to know that the solution proposed is a good one.

The same applies, if you've created a thread, where a working solution has not yet been given and you find a solution (by yourself, or somewhere else). Please DO NOT LEAVE the thread you've started orphaned. Just return to the thread and briefly indicate the solution you found.

Mark a thread as resolved

The easiest way to indicate that your problem is solved is to add "[SOLVED]" to the thread subject. Provided you're the original thread's author it is easy to do.

  • Go to the very first post of the thread
  • Modify the first message
  • You should see the "Subject" of the message. The subject defines the subject of the thread.
  • Simply add [SOLVED] to the beginning of the subject (leave the rest of the subject as it is).
  • Hit Save.

This procedure can also be used to fix typos in the thread subject if you later notice it has spelling mistakes.