The #help tag has real potential to become an area where developers can come to ask questions and have access to the growing amount of experienced developers that frequent this site.

Unfortunately, it has become a bit of a free-for-all for anything from helpful articles to extremely broad "I want to build x, how do I do it?" type questions.

It was time we updated the guidelines to reflect exactly what this section of Dev is for.

Introducing #help (again)

Going forward, all articles will be expected to follow the submission guidelines outlined below (it is also on the sidebar of #help and will evolve with the community):

This tag is to be used when you need to ask for help, not to share an article you think is helpful.When asking for help, please follow these rules:Title:Write a clear, concise, titleBody:What is your question/issue (provide as much detail as possible)?What technologies are you using?What were you expecting to happen?What is actually happening?What have you already tried/thought about?What errors are you getting?Please try to avoid very broad "How do I make x" questions, unless you have used Google and there are no tutorials on the subject.

What if my question doesn't fit within these guidelines?

There are some other great tags.

For example, if you want a general discussion about the best way forward or a piece of technology, there's #discuss.

If you generally can't find a tag for your question, and you think it should sit in #help then please reach out. We're happy to update these guidelines to suite the community.

Generally, the following action will be taken for posts that don't meet our guidelines:

• If a post is made, that doesn't follow the recommended format for the title/body we'll leave a comment and ask you to update it, or provide a reason why that's not possible. We'll remove the tag after 24 hours if we don't see an update/response.

• If a post is made that doesn't fit in with this section, we'll remove the tag and provide the reason why.

What about existing articles?

Nothing will be done to the existing articles.

I think your guidelines are wrong!

Excellent. Reach out to us and tell us how we can make them better!

How do I reach out?

The best way is to drop a comment on this post. We'll be linking to it from the sidebar, and it will become a living document.