[MOD] Posting guidelines for our 2001+ members .. (celebration time! we hit 2000!)

Oooooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhh yeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa, 2000 users! Get the campaign, celebrate!

A big thank you goes out to each of you for keeping the custom content coming in, good questions, really good blog articles from our members and sometimes an awesome script or two.. Keep up the good work, and lets keep expanding!

Now lets get down to business, shall we? Ashy and I have hashed out some really basic posting guidelines to help you all. Most of it is common sense, but we have received some complaints about the context of posts (or lack thereof) so I wanted to post these "rules" here...

Posting guidelines for questions

• FLAIR! I am not a coding guy at all, and it honestly was a tad bit of a pain to figure out how to get the searching thing to work with the pre-defined flair (see the sidebar, Searching r/ExchangeServer). Ashy and I read (posts + comments), moderate and at time flair off each post. Please do us a solid and apply the flair
• Provide details.. sweet god please provide details. Give us the following:

1. What version (or versions) of Exchange (SP + UR, or CU) are you running in your environment?
2. What does your environment consist of? Meaning how many AD sites where Exchange is installed, is there a CAS Array (and if so what kinda load balancer), DAG, TMG, third party applications?
3. How do you repro the issue, and can you repro the issue?
4. Logs, do they show anything? These can be Event Viewer logs or if you are so brave, IIS and RCA logs (RCA = RPC client access)

I mean, this does not apply to all questions out there but use your judgement. What I dont want to see is stuff like "hey guys, when I use ActiveSync's AutoDiscover feature it doesnt work - help please!". These posts dont help you get an answer any quicker, and sometimes frustrate some of the other members. We are all technical, so put yourself in the shoes of those helping you. More details the better.

• Actually search first. This does not happen often (or my memory is so shot that I am not seeing it) but sometimes we do get duplicate posts. You can filter out all questions by clicking the "Questions" link in the sidebar over here -----------------------> and then search from there. If you find something similar and the post is not active anymore / your question is not answered then feel free to post. But as we grow, we don't want to have the same question and answer over, and over, and over.

Posting guidelines for articles

• Flair. Same thing as above, just chose the "Article" or "MS KB / Update" flair
• Advertising is not permitted at all, and will be removed immediately. This is going to cause a some confusion, so let me explain. If you post a link to a 3rd party application that has helpful information within it that helps further ones knowledge, that is fine. If you send an article on how awesome a third party application is and has no real value to this community we will remove it, and we will contact you. Although this has not happened lately, we have had a few "Exchange 3rd party" vendors who just blatantly advertise their items with no real value at all to this community (e.g: no knowledge transfer - just "HEY - BUY OUR STUFF").. no. Go away. If you see this please report it and send us some mod mail.

We haven't chosen how we are going to actually enforce this, but please.. just be mature adults and chose your flair after posting.. leave details and keep the content useful (e.g: dont advertise!).

Cheers all, and thank you all again for making this sub successful!

• Ashy and evrydayzawrkday, your r/ExchangeServer mods