Forum

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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 undesirable look.

A code snippet such as this:

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...ends up looking like this:

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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.


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:

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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.

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

Share the Outcome

Forum is a common place to get help. If you run into a trouble and cannot figure this out by yourself and even Googled a lot, the forum is the best place to ask.

There're many experienced people who are eager to help you.

But, as soon as you get your answer, and you have your problem resolved. Please let everyone else know! That the proposed solution did work.

It's very easy to get overexcited, once things start working again, that you could forget to tell everyone else. Please DON'T forget, because we'd like to know, and anyone else who would run into the same issue, would like to know it either.

The same applies, if you've created a thread, didn't get the answer yet, but found the solution (by yourself, or somewhere else). Please DO NOT LEAVE the thread you've started orphaned. Just say, that solution is there.

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 is also useful to fix typos if you later notice the thread subject has spelling mistakes.