Welcome to the Particle Forums! We’re excited to have some helpful, interesting and engaging conversations here on the boards. As you get started, please take a minute to look over some guidelines for getting the most out of the forums.
First, a few notes on what we expect from community members:
- Play nice. People are trying to help, so there’s no need for attitude or general rudeness. Politeness will beat terseness every day of the week
- Give the community a little bit of time to answer your question – the person with the best answer may be on the other side of the world and asleep at the time you post.
- Help create an easy to use forum – do your best to avoid redundancy, to clearly identify your questions for others to search for later, and help create a general atmosphere of learning, trust and excitement to create.
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Stay on-topic. While we love when threads evolve and become interesting, it can be hard for the original poster if a thread wanders too far from its initial goal. Plus, more brief and on-topic threads allow for greater searchability and readability! -
Contribute when you can. Although we in the community do our best to answer everyone's questions, there are things we simply don't know or resources we don't yet have. If you're able to provide them, the community will love you for it! It's great karma and you'll get honored by the mods.
We think that these are pretty good guidelines to maintain a healthy atmosphere. If you have suggestions for others, let us know!
This is your safe space, so if you feel that a user is violating these guidelines please feel free to flag them or to notify an Elite or Particle team member who can do so for you. If someone’s posts are flagged as inappropriate over three times, they will receive a warning. If they are flagged or deleted over ten times, that person will be banned from the forums.
How to use the Particle Forum when you have a question:
Step 1: Create an account
- You should be able to do this by creating a new account with the “Sign Up” button in the upper right corner. Note that your community account here is not the same as your Particle account on build.particle.io and the mobile app.
Step 2: Search the forums before asking your question.
- It is entirely possible that someone else has run into the same issue you’re facing – check to see if they’ve posted it or a very similar question in the past before starting your own thread. This will help us all avoid redundancy and make it easier to find the answers we’re looking for…
Step 3: Ask a question or start a topic
- Click +Create Topic at the upper right hand corner
Step 4: Create a searchable subject line
- Make it easy for others who have the same question to find your thread later
- Bad subject lines: “Help!” “I’ve got a question” “Keep seeing error”
- Good subject lines: “First time connecting using Smart Config” “Receiving error message S40DD” “How do I integrate Twitter into my Spark application?”
Step 5: Use proper sentences
- Technical jargon is totally fine but let’s all do our best to type out questions and avoid text message language, cool? Cool.
Step 6: What to include in your message
- If you reference an error message include that exact message
- Identify what you’re really trying to do, not just the step you’re hitting a snag on – someone in the community may have a way for you to skip that step altogether, but they need to know what you’re doing!
- If you’re using an important library or language that is not standard to Spark be sure to identify it and possibly point people to a place they can download and install it themselves.
Step 7: Post your message. It feels like there should be more to say here, but really this one is fairly self-explanatory.
One last note:
You may occasionally see comments from people with the Elite title next to their name. Particle Elites are community members who work closely with the Particle Team and moderate the forums. They’re experts who are here to help!
PS – Now that you’ve read through this and other category definitions you can select “clear pin” so it no longer sits at the top of all of your categories.