User blog:RansomTime/Need some Help? A guide to getting (and giving) help on Central Chat

Hey, I'm RansomTime. You might know me as that guy who blocked someone on your wiki or that guy who's on chat a lot. I'm here today to talk a bit about asking questions on community central chat.

We're here to help
There's 2 reason's that people are on chat:
 * To talk with the Wikia community
 * To get help or answer your questions

Some people on central chat are just starting out, others have been here for ages, so if you've got a problem, there may well be someone to help.

So if you need help, feel free to come into chat and ask!

What not to do if you need help
My best advice if you want to get some help on central chat is to ask the question.

We are a help chat, and we see people come in every day who needs help. Asking your question is the best way to get people interested in helping you. Asking if anyone knows anything about x might get you know reply. For instance, if you ask "does anyone know anything about infoboxes" - I'm not sure what to say, I know a lot about the old-style infoboxes, but I haven't used the new style infoboxes, so I'd be unsure about answering a "yes" to that. If you asked a question, then everyone who knows about would be able to chime in and help.

It's also best to start off in the public chat, that way if someone goes away someone else can keep answering your question, knowing what you've tried so far. Also, if chat is empty, people might take a bit to read your question, if you've given a good description, they could send you a message straight away, whilst if you asked if anyone was around and no-one was, you might have a slow time sending messages back and foth as you each go away and do different things.

I want to help out
If you think you know the answer to something, go ahead and help to the best of your ability, there's no shame in saying "I don't know anything about this part" at a later point, someone else might know.

Importantly, if you don't know the answer, don't try to make up something that sounds right, as that might confuse people, and make it harder to do something. Remember you can always test things out before replying back. I find that making a quick edit to a test wiki with some code goes a long way to showing people how to solve an issue.

No-one can answer my question
Really sorry about that, sometimes chat's not that busy - sometimes there needs to be a lot of work and no-one on chat has the time, luckily there's more help available.


 * The central forums are a fantastic resource. Not only can you ask your question, you can also search through the archives to see if someone else has asked it before. If you've got a question that you think requires a lot of code, this might be the best place to go.
 * Wikia staff can answer your questions about account issues, content ownership and copyright, clarifications about the Terms of Use, activating features on your wiki, issues with problem users and more, the best way to contact them is at Special:Contact.

FAQs
I'm going to try to keep this as a list of things we get asked regularly, hopefully it's of some use to some of you.

If you have a question that you think would be a good FAQ, please leave it in the comments. If you've got a good answer, please add that too.