How to ask for support from the Drupal community

The other pages in this guide, and other documentation on this site, should hopefully help you keep your site running, and fix problems that come up. But sometimes, even though you have read the documentation, you might need help figuring out how to fix a problem, configuring your site, or adding new functionality.

Where to get support

The Support page on drupal.org (Resources > Support in the top navigation menu) lists many resources for getting support, ranging from reading documentation, to posting questions in support forums and online chat, to paid support options. Note that the discussion section of this page is NOT a support forum.

How to ask for support

Once you have decided on a support channel, here are some tips for making an effective support post -- people will be more likely to help you if you follow these suggestions, whether you are posting in a text chat or forum.

Try to resolve the problem first

Be sure to at least try to solve your problem before posting. In your post, list the steps you followed, which will help responders see where you went wrong, or what the problem might be.

Read the documentation before posting

Be sure to do a search on drupal.org and on the internet, to see if there is documentation for your problem. If you read and followed documentation, put a link to the documentation you read in your post. Likewise, if people provide a link to documentation in their answers, be sure to read it. If you have further questions after reading, then try and refine your post further.

Don't expect anyone to take more time to answer the question than you did to ask it

If you state a problem in one sentence but the answer would take 2 pages to explain, your post may be ignored. This is particularly true for questions of the "Hi, I'm brand new to web design how do I make www.best-site-ever.com with Drupal?" variety.

Provide a descriptive and specific title (forums only)

If you are posting to a forum, a good title is important. Most responders will scan forums for posts of interest, and a title that is not specific or doesn't describe the problem will most likely be ignored. Also, using all-caps will most likely make people want to ignore your post. So a post like "Getting error X in installation" or "Help with thinking through corporate Internet site design" is more likely to attract someone who can assist with your problem than a post title like "HELP!!!! MY SITE IS BROKEN!!!!"

Be specific

Large, open ended questions like "how to i use the x module" or "how do I make a community site" are far too generic and time consuming to answer in support channel. They will likely simply be ignored or replied to with a request for more details. So instead, ask something like "I'm trying to use the x module, I've read the available docs, checked the issue queue, I've already done a, b, and c but I still can't figure out how to do y.".

Provide relevant details

Often, before someone may be able to assist you, they will need to know the Drupal version number, the modules you've enabled and their version, the hosting environment, the specific error generated, and other relevant information. Incomplete support requests just end up requiring a volley of question and answer, lengthening the time it takes to resolve an issue-- if you receive a reply at all. No one should have to become Sherlock Holmes to figure out what you're asking for. You can find a status report in the administration screen, ready to be pasted into a forum topic. Of course you should still provide enough context for the information to be useful.

Don't hijack topics created by others

If you have a follow-up question, don't "hijack" questions posted in forums by other members of the community by posting your follow-up question without considering whether it would be more logical to create a new topic. If you create a new topic, you can post a one-line comment on the previous post with a link to your new topic. Also, in your new topic, refer to the old post and indicate why the answer does not apply to your use case. However, you should not create a new topic with the same question as one already answered.

Don't bump a topic more than once in a day

If you don't receive a response it is acceptable to 'bump' your own post, preferably with additional information, in order to keep it on the active list. However, do not bump a topic more than once in 24 hours and do not complain about the community if your problem isn't responded to immediately. Remember, the people answering questions are all volunteers.

Ignore flames and rude tones

Drupal is a large international community. Since many members are not native English speakers, realize that a brusque tone may be a result of language differences and should not be immediately interpreted as rude. Regardless, if you feel like another user has flamed you, the best response is to ignore the offense and continue working toward discussing productive solutions.

Be polite

While it is very easy to become frustrated when grappling with a problem, remember that Drupal community members donate their time in offering support. People are more likely to respond to posts which ask nicely for assistance over those that demand it or complain. Politeness can make a difference.

Don't use excessive punctuation and/or capitals

Most experienced forum users find excessive punctuation and capitals irritating and doing so will likely have exactly the opposite effect of what you're trying to do.

Enable your personal contact form

So that people may offer assistance privately by email, be sure to edit your user account and check the Personal contact form box. This feature does not share your email address, but rather forwards the message to you via drupal.org.

If you solve your problem, follow-up, explain, and prepend '[Solved]' to the subject

Many times people open a question, get several suggestions on troubleshooting, then either disappear or follow up with "It's OK, the problem is solved now!" It is better to post a note saying which of the solutions fixed it for you, or if it was something else altogether, or even if it was just a "Doh!" mistake. This is to help others that may encounter the same problem you did. If it exists, provide a link to the documentation or discussion that helped you, so others can find it when searching. It's common that the same problem can be described in many ways, and your search phrases or issue title may be different from the ones that the writer was thinking of when they wrote the documentation or post you link to. You can add a cross-reference from your post to a better one ... if you have found it. This also prevents your problem post from being a frustrating dead-end for later seekers, and your problem becomes part of the solution!

Make suggestions about documentation improvements

It is helpful if you can make suggestions for improving specific documentation pages. For example: "I was looking at pages X,Y,Z in the documentation, but couldn't see/understand the answer I expected to find there". This would enable the support volunteer to copy a summary of their forum answers to the documentation pages, so others can find them. Terminology and mind-maps differ between the reader and writer, so if you can let know where you expect to find the answer ... we can copy/link it to there for next time. Of course, this does assume you did some of your own research first ;-)

Do not rely on links

Be careful when posting a link to your own, or any other external website. Make sure the link is relevant and useful to the issue at hand. Also keep in mind that websites change over time and may be taken down. When this happens, the information pointed to by the link is no longer available. So, always provide enough context to make your posting useful without the link.

Another consideration: Some links are spam. Our spam-filter is wary about links, and will unpublish your post if it detects a spam-link. Posts where the link is unrelated to the content, or where the text in the post is too generic, it will always be treated as spam. For instance, posting a link to your own website and asking how to convert it to Drupal is too generic (as it cannot be answered beyond "Hire a consultant") and will be routinely unpublished.

Share your composer.json file for Composer questions

If you are having problems with Composer, for example running composer update, please ask in the Composer forum, and include the following:

1. Drupal version (original/target), Composer version, PHP version, Operating System, and Local server setup (DDEV, Lando, XAMPP, etc.)
2. Your composer.json file
3. The command you ran, including the result

This makes it much easier to help you solve your issue.

How to add an image

Unfortunately, you may only embed an image in a forum post if the image is hosted on Drupal.org (and there is no trivial way to upload an image when editing a forum post). If you need to post a screenshot to illustrate your problem, don't try to embed the image in your forum post, instead upload the image to a third party website (e.g. Google drive, Dropbox) and then include a plain link to the externally hosted image in your post.

While links to external websites are generally deprecated, links to screenshots that illustrates the problem you seek support for, are OK.

With volunteer support, not everyone gets a response

And finally, if your post has gone unanswered, perhaps no one that has read your post has the solution to your problem. Whining or complaining about it will more than likely not get you an answer and may harm your chances of getting assistance in the future. You might also consider whether the title for the post is specific enough. And if you feel like support response could be better on drupal.org, please donate some of your time, too, to answering support questions. In a volunteer effort, the only way to improve support is for everyone to participate.

Guidelines for providing support

Do not post AI-generated answers

Because the average quality of answers generated by ChatGPT and other AI tools seldom makes these answers useful, posting of answers created by AI-tools is considered harmful to community and to users who are coming to Drupal.org seeking support. Therefore, you should not use AI to generate your answer to a support question, feature request or bug report.

Other websites used for support is taking similar measures. For instance, see this post on StackOverflow: ChatGPT is banned.

Do not include your name in the title or multiple times

Spammers have begun injecting names multiple times, for example in the title, in the beginning of the post as part of a salutation ("Hello I am ...") or at the end of the post itself. This method can be plain SEO spam, or a new SEO-based reputation management scheme, attempting to bury negative news stories in search engines:

The main red flag is putting "their" name in the subject (good for SEO). I've documented many examples here: at simon-smart88/Hinduja_spam on GitHub and you can find more by googling "hinduja site:drupal.org"

So please keep greetings limited to a "Hello," or "Hi," in the beginning, and do not insert your name multiple times. Otherwise, your account may be blocked.

Additional Information

• Terminology: Use Google’s "define:" tag (ie define: taxonomy) to get the definition of unfamiliar words or drupal.org's Glossary for drupal specific jargon.
• Issue reports
• The classic guide to asking smart questions in support forums (the tone is harsh, but the info is quite good).
• Identifying and eliminating "Help Vampires" By Amy Hoy.