In order to maximize our ability to help as many people as possible, and in order to keep things friendly and fun, we have some forum guidelines that we ask you to follow when posting new topics or commenting. I present them below in a delightful series of short “Dos and Don’ts”
Do
Focus! If you have multiple problems, make multiple posts. Do not combine several problems into one post.
Include the following: Distro/version, when you installed, steps to cause the problem, any errors you got, relevant log entries.
Test with a fully updated system before posting a question.
Tell us what you’ve already tried, and what happened (briefly!).
Tell us the actual error and include a few relevant lines from the applicable log (maillog or access log or error log, most likely).
Be patient. We are a small team and the work we do here in the forums and on our OSS projects is unpaid volunteer labor. If you’re friendly, and ask good and clear and concise questions, you’re more likely to inspire people to try to help you.
Remember that if your problem is urgent and affecting your business, etc., you can make it urgent to our business by becoming a paying customer.
If your problem gets solved, please mark the comment that helped with the “Solution” button, or if you solved it on your own, follow up with a summary of what you did (this helps others in the future, and may help you if your solution will have unintended consequences that others might be able to warn you about).
Don’t
Don’t follow random guides on the internet for installing Virtualmin. Visit our download page, it provides all the information you need to get started with Virtualmin in concise form.
Don’t send PMs or emails to staff asking for one-on-one help with our Open Source software. Virtualmin Pro and Cloudmin Pro customers can PM @staff for private priority support.
Don’t post sensitive information to the forums (or via individual private message). If you’re a customer and need us to see something sensitive, send a PM to @staff.
Don’t make zombies. Searching for similar problems is great! But, reviving old posts with new questions is bad. It forces someone to read the whole thread to understand context, and often includes misleading context (your problem may be completely unrelated to the one you’re replying to).
Don’t change the subject. One question per topic, please. Off-topic comments may be removed by moderators.
Don’t panic if your post gets queued for moderation. Our spam filter is overly aggressive sometimes, but we’ll publish your post as soon as we see it in the queue.
Don’t ask us to login to your server. We can’t be your sysadmin. If we need to see some specific information you haven’t included, we’ll ask, and if troubleshooting a particularly complex problem requires logging in, we’ll ask.
Don’t post ChatGPT or other language model generated text as an answer. We will know (because it is consistently wrong in subtle, but distinctive ways, and has impeccable grammar), and we will assume you are a spammer trying to gain reputation. We’ll delete your post and probably block you.
Don’t do bigotry of any sort: racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, religious intolerance, etc. You will be banned without warning.
Don’t be mean. Treat people with respect. We’ll give you a warning if you step over the line, but only once.
Bonus Do’s
Make suggestions below about anything I’ve missed in this list.
Improve your situational awareness by reading a few topics before posting your own questions.
If you’re using mod_php, stop. If you’ve installed mod_php, uninstall it. mod_php is usually in the php package or php<version>-php package. Don’t install that package. You don’t need it or want it. If you followed random guides on the internet for installing additional PHP versions, you probably also installed mod_php. Again, uninstall it.
If you’re using a proxy, including Cloudflare, say so. That’s a very important detail for many kinds of issues.
though suggestion: if newbie if new installed and having more then one problem you can’t know for sure they are standalone problems ( you think yourself i did something (onething/step) wrong and therefore more problems in once.
So what is then better to: Focus! If you have multiple problems, make multiple posts. ?
Or first create in 1post a enumeration as newbie and ask in this post if these pobs could related, talking here about newbies as me, thinking they did something wrong with the installation. ( then go on in the 1 post or if not related in the multiple post if support says so)
This to prevent that with one issue / mistake causing multiple probs you can look over that.
I myself waited more then 1-2 weeks reading here and docs into the probs themselves before posting, thinking myself ok something wrong with what i used ore did , has broken a few things, so summing up all of these and yes in combination with my english probably a mess to read for your support, excuses. uh sofar i will try next (briefly!)
I wasn’t singling you or anyone else out with this post! You’re not the first person to post lengthy problem reports with a lot of unrelated details. It happens every day and has happened for the entire life of the project.
Use your best judgment to decide when problems are closely related, perhaps caused by one change you made.
There are a few areas where one misconfiguration or problem can cause many problems:
DNS and FQDN
Reverse DNS and email
DNS glue records
Low memory
DHCP-configured network
There may be some others, but those are the ones that spring to mind.
It may be useful to post those sorts of problems all in one post…but, any one of the problems they cause may be enough to diagnose the problem, and posting a bunch of details about the many problems they can cause only makes it take a lot longer to read and understand what’s happening. It’s often the case that a bunch of related problems is most easily diagnosed in isolation just because I can’t hold multiple complex problems in my head at one time. Give me small problems, and I’ll solve them quick. Give me complicated problems and I may not be able to solve them at all, given the time I have available to dedicate to forum posting each day.
When in doubt, err on the side of shorter, simpler, questions. Tell us what went wrong and how you got there for one problem at a time.
“ps: if possible - please remove from user account - track the forum posts that are marked as ‘Access Denied’ that would be really plus.”
I don’t know how to do that, unfortunately. Drupal is supposed to hide unavailable posts in the general case, so it’s kinda bug-like that it’s showing you things you can’t read.
But, I don’t think it’s a common problem; mostly you won’t be on trackable threads unless you have access to them because you had to have access to comment on them. This only changes if a thread is marked private after your reply, which is rare, and we discourage marking anything private (except in the issue tracker where things are now private by default). That actually reminds me I need to add that to the guidelines: No private forum posts! (I, unfortunately, can’t disable private forum posts without revealing old private posts which may contain still-sensitive information.)
Don’t know if it maters for the better.
To have her a howto or link to that howto, to find what is running on the box versions and so on .
Then the ( todo howto) copy and paste to post in every topic start where some have a problem with that box.
Then the version and so more problems to asked first should be solved, and support can going on , before spending “nonsene time” asking to post versions.
For example “Adamus” is doing a good job here https://www.virtualmin.com/comment/804415#comment-804415
For log / error log files such links / howto could be handy to. ( sometimes if one does that search in logs they find the error and solution themselves)
So i “hate” lot of support questions here on forum without those persons read and follow these guidelines first. ( more and more this happens now lately, support and other forum helpers must guess a lot and first asking also questions that is so depressing… not done)
Maybe ok somewhere in new forum software this topic more BOLD and…
Also a simple click system when someone didn’t follow the guidelines.
Example with predefined texts as: please read our forum guidelines: Post your version, LOG error messages and did you use search.?
I don’t want to … , and think lot off others sighs before then yes or no takes time to yes or no answer, but on what to answer if not knowing more about…?
For this forum software a BUMP in this TOPIC has some effect to have this first in result ( last post) hihi.
I think Stack Exchange Q&A communities are a great example of how those bad questions can be handled with a simple down-vote, which happens to be a good content representation feature to the future reader about both a question and a user asking it. I assume it would help us as well.
I’ve never seen any good come of a down vote option. It is always abused by people that get upset, create multiple accounts and start downvoting the person / persons they’re angry with.
For this purpose there is a serial upvotes/downvotes algorithms exist preventing this from happening. Moreover users with low trust levels wouldn’t be able to use this feature.
This one one nr1:
If someone in the support forum point you to the Forum guidelines then please be so kind to read these here and post the missing parts in your start topic!
