[Matthew Brown]

This group is for Theme support. Our blogs come with two types of themes – ours and third-party themes. Users with Author Buzz blogs can receive support with both here. People with WordPress blogs hosted elsewhere can ONLY receive support for our themes here. For this reason, it is important to state where your blog is and which theme you are asking for support on.

A really good help request which leaves the rest of the thread for solutions is a resource for future users. If the exact problem and the answer are on the same page, anyone can read it and their problem may be solved too.

On the other hand, three pages of “have you tried turning it off and on again?”, “Uh, hang on”, “I’m hanging…”, “Yeah”, “So, what happened?”, “Um, hang on, lol”… You can see how that helps no one else, right?

Good support requests get help faster

There is a certain minimum amount of information that anyone will need in order to help you. You can chose to include it in your initial post or force someone to ask you about it and then wait for you to post the information you could have included to start with. Then you have to wait for someone to read through the Q & A to figure out the problem.

If I have to ask ten follow up questions to figure out what the problem is, that’s ten other people I could have been helping while I work with you. That could turn a ten-minute help request into a few days of mostly waiting around. If I’m not busy this is no hardship for me but some days I have a lot on. So, please, help a guy out and post a good help request so I can help you have a great day.

How to post a good support request.

A good support request has a topic title that provides insight into what your question is.

Use a descriptive title

Titles like “Help Plz” or “It is not working” or not helpful at all. It should go without saying that something might be wrong and that you would like help – you are posting here, after all. They might even get ignored if the community is busy. Instead, try to say what the theme is and what the nature of the problem is.

Try something like this:

• Author Buzz Basic Theme (self-hosted) footer widget alignment issue
• Author Buzz Basic (here) how do I customise the header?
• Agama Blue (here) how do I change the menu order?

How to write a great support request

The best support requests give all the pertinent facts but no more – we do not need your entire life story.

If there is a bug, error or fault, your post should tell us what you did, what your expected to happen, and what actually happened. When someone reads your post (say, me for example) they should be able to identify the problem, replicated it (make it happen again), and locate the source of the issue in order to take action.

If you need help understanding how to do something, you should include the objective you are trying to achieve and the steps you have taken so far to solve the problem for yourself. From this, others will be able to offer you the best possible advice.

For example:

My social media links are not working

I’m going to have to go and look at your links before I can even give you anything like an answer.

However:

I shoved sixteen URLs into the box for the Facebook link and the link is all screwy.

Well, now. At least I don’t have to go anywhere to figure out what the problem is. However, I cannot help you because I have no idea what on earth you were trying to accomplish.

Consider this:

I wanted to have sixteen Facebook links in my social media menu. I tried putting all of them in the one box and that resulted in a single link that was very broken.

Only now, can I see that you are confused as to how menus work, and offer you advice as to how to add links properly.

What else should I include?

At the end of your support request please include the following:

• The name of the theme you are using.
• Where you are using it (on site, self-hosted, or somewhere else).
• A link to the blog in question.
• A link to a page exhibiting the issue (if different).
• A screenshot if the blog or page is not public facing.

Use appropriate tags

You can supply a comma-separated list of topic tags. At the very least you should tag your post with the theme name you are asking about.

Here are some other useful tags:

• Bug: Something is wrong
• How to: I want to know how to do something
• Feature Request: It does not do this but I wish it did
• Widgets: My request is about widgets
• Customisation: My request is about personalising my blog
• Images: My request relates to images
• Formatting: I have a question about formatting
• Post: My questions is about posts
• Comments: I’ve got a query about the comments section
• Plugin: I want to know about using a plugin with the theme

What to do when the problem is solved?

Once your problem is solved, please edit your first post and add one of the following to the beginning of the title.

• [Fixed] – My problem has been fixed
• [Solved] – I have the answer
• [Closed] – For any other reason that the issue is no longer live

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