Posting Question Procedures?

On the original posting I was trying to ascertain if there were any posted rules on how to ask questions here and have a good chance of receiving a useful answer.

I have yet to find any clear or not so clear rules for navigating and finding the answers we need.

The search function does not help most of us very much. I like to use the forums to gain more knowledge and possibly help someone else.

There are many, many community volunteers who attempt to answer questions, but because the poster of questions do not provide needed info, the job of providing viable answers really becomes very problematic.

Now in defense of a new user:: If I do not know if there are any rules for getting a question posted, then I will do as many users do-

I ask a hit and miss attempt to get my question answered because I need help and I know of no other way. I know, I did this as well when I first started using the forums.

New User= How would I know, never having been here before, even that these are user to user forums and volunteers provide most of the help?

How would I know that the forums are broken out by type of product, ie, QuickBooks Pro and Premier with a specific function as a sub forum, such as inventory,warehouse management, etc.

There are even forums for the industry that relate to your specific business, but how would I know that, I am a new user and have no idea how to find the right forum to post to..

There has been more help from Intuit employees recently. I would think that Intuit and their employees would have a vested interest in getting people to the right place with clear instructions on how to post.

Right now it is like trying to find your way across country without a map or roadsigns.

As of this posting there have been over six hundred users to view. Maybe if we can get that up to ten thousand or more then maybe Intuit will improve their driving conditions, as an analogy.

Mr. Tucker:

These are good guidelines.  I am giving you top billing in the general QB forum for the time being.

Thank you for your input.

 I would say please use complete and concise sentences to describe your problem. I hate having to decode and piece together what people are trying to say because they just ask questions in one word phrases and their description has nothing to do with their question. 

Things seem cryptic, vague and unclear, because many of the users who post here do so from "within the product." QB Help window opens to Live Community, now. Many times it appears this is a Chat function. They post a couple of keywords, expecting a ping back for discussion purposes.

They don't see a forum structure. They don't see headings. They don't see icons. They don't see a Search field. They enter something in "type your question here." and a forum search is processed, returning a short list (4, for what I just tested, "Payroll Report") of similarly-titled topics (you know there are more than this if you do a search using the forum's Search field). Then, they have the button to continue with Ask My Question. It's all still very generic. There is no indication that this is an Internet-based forum software interface.

I hope this gives you some insight to why many of the posts look like they are Post-it Notes!

Also within every QuickBooks software there is QuickBooks help.

1. Click on help
2. go to help with QB's(the first selection on the drop down) click on it and a search box appears. Just type in your question
3. or scroll down to learning center tutorial
4. And last but not least, call QB's support. Press option on How to customize or learn how to use a feature in QuickBooks.

I am a brand new user of this forum and I am finding it really hard to navigate.  It's not at all intuitive. I am familiar with typical forum structure and use it for other software regularly.  A video or something that just takes you through the basics of this one would be a great help. It is really very different from other forums I use.

When searching the forums, I use Google and put "site:community.intuit.com" in the search field with the words or phrase that I am searching by.

Then, when Google finds what I am looking for, there are options to limit by date range, or other parameters.

Laura D

I'm not sure where to post this, but I find this forum extremely hard to navigate.  Like someone else who posted above, I like just reading posts to learn and offer help.  But dang it!  You click on a question, read it and the replies, and there's no way to get back to the previous page (no address bar so you can hit the "Back" arrow...) and so you click in the forum link above, and there you are back on the first page of forum topics again, and if you were on the 3rd page of topics, you have to click next... next...

PLEASE!  make this forum more user-friendly!