Getting Help On Drupal

It is irritating when people ask trival questions on Drupal without making an effort to search and find answers from documentation. It is even more irritating when they ping you on IM.

I understand that a trivial thing for one is not the same for another. And we all did not know anything before and we too took help to learn Drupal. But the issue is, it is quite evident from the way they ask these questions, that they have made a zero effort to find the answers from the documentations available. It becomes even more evident when they ask you a question, you give them the link to the specific documentation page, and they come right back at you asking for a step by step procedure. And they want it now.  It is really annoying.

Here are some of the proper and more efficient ways of getting help on Drupal.

1. Install a test Drupal instance and play around with it. Trust me - you learn a lot from just twiddling around with the settings.
2. Head over to Drupal Handbooks - almost everything about the core is covered there.
3. Search for answers at Drupal Forums. Only when you do not find, post a question there.
4. Search answers using Google or Yahoo. There are many who write their experiences with Drupal on their blogs. The search engine spiders do a good job of indexing them.
5. And even after all these, do not IM people asking questions. Even mailing them is not considered appropriate, but I myself do not mind that. The proper way to interact with someone is to go to the #drupal-support IRC channel at freenode.

When you do find answers, contribute back by posting it in the forums, document it, or even blog about it if you have blog. This way, the next person facing the same question can find the answer.