Despite being an ancient thread - it’s still very useful and should live on 
SInce its first appearence things have evolved a bit and so I’d like to add some points to @Steph’s list:
Sub-bullets to Step 6:
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If you’ve got some code that doesn’t seem to work or do what you want, provide a boiled down version that might be directly flashed to one of our own devices or at least a snippet of your misbehaving code that could be copy-pasted in a rudimentary test sketch.
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For code formatting and other tips and tricks for this forum have a thorough read of this thread (http://community.particle.io/t/forum-tips-and-tricks/3999)
Edit: This is a good read too http://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask