Welcome To How Do I

This is a new forum. As its description states, it is a place where forum members can ask and provide help on a wide variety of topics, with the exception of medical advice or forum help, as the former could be problematic and we already have a place for the latter.

If what you're looking for is an overall discussion on the topic of whatever it is that you're looking for help with, you can continue to post those questions in the subject area that corresponds to whatever it is that you're looking for help with.

This area is strictly for requesting and giving help with how to do something, without any side conversations, even if they are relevant to the topic. Opening posts should be requests for help with something, and subsequent posts should be restricted to offering that help.

If you don't know how to do whatever it is that someone is asking for help with or if you think they should be doing something else instead, those comments would be off-topic here, as would somewhat related questions. If you have a question similar to what the OP is asking, create a thread for it.

Ideally, the first person who replies to an OP request would be someone who believes that s/he knows how to do the thing that is being requested, and it would probably be best if everyone else let that person finish with any necessary follow-up questions, and be able to offer the help that is requested.

Once that is completed, then, by all means, feel free to offer another way to do it if you think you have a better way.

I understand that this process differs from other parts of the Forum and, for that reason, posts in this area will be moderated, temporarily, which means that threads and posts won't be visible until they've been approved. This is just so that we see how threads and replies are handled here. Once we have a few threads in this section, and it seems that at least several of you understand what it's about, then I will remove the moderation from it.

We have people here who know how to do a lot of different things and, while these things have been discussed in the subject area threads, sometimes a lot of good information gets lost in the banter and the side discussions.

So basically, what I'd like to see here is a question, followed by an answer in however many posts it takes. If clarification of the question is needed, that would be appropriate. After a question has been asked and answered, then other answers would be welcome.

If this is confusing, I can understand that. In this thread, feel free to ask for any clarifications that might be needed.

 

For example, if someone posted a thread asking how to build a chicken coop...

• It would be appropriate if someone asked how many chickens they planned on keeping or whether they lived in a cold-weather area or a warm-weather area because these questions might need to be answered in order to provide a useful how-to response.
• However, if you didn't plan on answering the question anyhow, either because you're not interested or you don't know anything about building chicken coops, then these questions would be unnecessary banter.
• Telling the OP that they can buy chicken coops on Amazon would be off-topic because they were asking how to build one, not where to buy one.
• While it might seem helpful to refer someone to another website where someone else has answered the question, this would not be appropriate. Pretty much everyone knows how to use Google or Bing, and the question is being asked here, not in a search engine query form, and if you have to turn to a search engine query form in order to answer the question, then you probably don't know how to build a chicken coop.
• If you disagree with the answer given by the first person who is answering the question, don't argue, as this isn't the place for arguments. Instead, wait until the question has been answered completely and then provide an alternative answer if you'd like. If the OP wants to ask further questions to help decide which of these answers might be best, that's fine, as long as it relates to the original post, and answers have been provided. Clarification is not off-topic.
• However, if the OP wants to know which chickens would be the best to raise, that's a separate topic that should be posted in a separate thread.

The objective is to not allow answers to get lost in a bunch of other stuff. Questions that require only a one-word or a one-sentence answer should probably be asked on another subject area of the Forum, as I'd rather reserve this area for how-to stuff.

Keep in mind, also, that there may not be anyone here who knows how to do what you're asking. The question will still remain, since someone might come along in the future who know how to do it.

 

By the way, this doesn't change anything for the rest of the Forum. If you have a question about building a chicken coop, and you want to get links to other websites that have floor plans for chicken coops, or to websites with chicken coops for sale in one place or another, and if you don't mind all the chicken pictures, the stories about chickens, or the comments about horrible you are for raising chickens, then you can post the question in another area of the Forum, and it won't be moved here without your permission.