Forum Do's and Don'ts

Zen Cart Forum Etiquette

Forum Do’s and Don’ts

Above all, be polite.

  • You’re coming into an office - is your behavior office appropriate?
  • If you’re asking for help, the people trying to help you are volunteers, not your staff. Is your tone appropriate?
  • Don’t take your frustrations out on people in the forum.

If you behave rudely, the people best positioned to help you may block you, preventing you from getting the help you need.

Do:

  • Search for posts relevant to your problem.

  • Read the Zen Cart documentation to see if the answer is there.

  • Make the headline for your post relevant to your problem. Be as precise as possible - “Help!” if not a good headline.

  • Tell us about your host and versions of Zen Cart and PHP so that we can diagnose more easily. How to find your Zen Cart, PHP and MySQL version.

  • Help others where you can. The best way to learn a subject is to teach someone else.

Don’t:

  • Post links to commercial services.

  • Bump your post. If you have not gotten an answer in a reasonable amount of time. Post a reply to your own existing post with more details of what you have and haven’t done to attempt to cure the problem or find answers to your questions. Try to explain your issue in a different way.

  • Private Message the Support Team or other developers trying to get their attention for your post. The whole idea of the forum is education and a problem solved privately benefits no one except you.

  • Hijack a thread: If a thread is asking one question and you want to ask a different one, just create a new thread in the relevant forum; don’t hijack the threads. (The exception is support threads for plugins.)

  • Cross Post. Cross Posting is posting the same message in multiple threads or posting links to threads on other boards. It’s seen as spam.

  • Use banners or other images in your signature line. You will be asked to remove them. See signature guidelines.

  • Hold independent contests or raffles.

  • Use barcodes as avatars.

Please realize that your issue may be so specific to your environment and customizations that forum users won’t be able to figure it out. In that case, you will need to post to the Commercial Help Wanted forum to find a developer to help you.



Still have questions? Use the Search box in the upper right, or try the full list of FAQs. If you can't find it there, head over to the Zen Cart support forum and ask there in the appropriate subforum. In your post, please include your Zen Cart and PHP versions, and a link to your site.

Is there an error or omission on this page? Please post to General Questions on the support forum. Or, if you'd like to open a pull request, just review the guidelines and get started. You can even PR right here.
Last modified November 10, 2021 by Scott C Wilson (bdbcc87).