This guideline is for every member of FifthTry who talks to outsiders about what we do (doesn’t everyone who works at FifthTry does that?).

This is especially important if you play a role in support, marketing, training, development etc roles in FifthTry.

When you talk to people about stuff we do, especially about fastn stack, they will have questions. If you are giving verbal answer to a new question, note down the question and the answer and create an entry our Q&A Forum.

If you get a question in Discord, WhatsApp etc, encourage them to post the question on the Q&A forum. If they do not post the question promptly, create the question yourself.

Notice how he actually answer the question, not just linked to any documentation. Notice Ganesh also included link to markdown documentation. Notice also he included the code snippet. Further notice that he gave link to working example.

The answer we give in Q&A Forum can not be the “source of truth” about the information you are giving. The answer should like to official documentation about the property or feature you are using.

Eg if someone asks how to add padding to text, and say padding property is not yet documented in our official documentation, then first add the padding to the official docs, and then add a link to padding in the answer.

If answer refers to more than one concept, link to each concept from the official documentation.

The answer has to be complete proper answer with links to concepts. Eg

To add padding to any text node you can use the padding property.

Here the padding should be a link to the padding property.

Do not just paste the link as answer. Use proper sentence. Goal is not repeat things, the answer on itself must be informative and complete answer to the question. But it should link to right places if the person wants to learn more or wants to verify the facts.

For every example create a document in some repo. We have ftd-examples repo with quite a few examples, so it can be added there. Or if need be create a new repo with just that use case.

Do not just paste the snippet.

An unswered question looks like this:

Where as an answered question looks like this:

Sometimes the person who has asked the question will use the wrong text box to ask for clarification or comment on answer.

Remind people to only suggest an answer if it is an independent answer to the original quesiton, and not some comment on question or existing answer.

Github does not have a way to ask for comment on question without answering the question.

Give a prompt answer quickly, so the question asker can continue, but do create official docs, links, examples etc, as the answer is work we are doing, we are creating a repository of high quality answers for most questions. We are not in a hurry, this is not a side project. This is the offical job.

If you do not get time to answer some question properly, if you are busy, it is still on you to post a link in the water-cooler channel on Discord to say, “hey I answered this question because I was in hurry and wanted to ensure the user was not left hanging, but this answer does not meet the FifthTry Standard, so can someone else please take over”.

Even if someone asked the question in person, verbally, do remember to share the question link with them and ask them to subscribe to question, so if there is any update, say in our example if we changed from padding: 10 to padding.px: 10 we should update the answer, and the person to whom we told hey use padding: 10, they should learn that now they have to write padding.px: 10.

Further ask them to upvote your answer if it works, so if the answer does not work for them the loop closes, we will know, we can keep looking for their upvote. Either they upvote it, or they comment saying this does not work. This ensures we know for sure the person who asked the question is satisfied.

If the person is not upvoting, but has answered in discord etc, please ping AmitU to accept the answer.

We want to be the best community. We want people to think that we have the highest quality documentation, that we are the nicest people who always spend a lot of effort in helping me. These things are not optional part of our job, but the main job. We can not not have time for it because we are busy with “work”.

If people do not get prompt and high quality answers, we will not be able to make a new language work.

We are not just aiming for programmers, who are used to googling and going through frustrating experience of trying one thing and then next, we are aiming for non programmers, who are not so patient, or who do not yet know that programming is a very frustrating exercise.

People will get frustrated because they are new to coding, and they will not blame coding but us. There will always be fear of “oh why did I chose FTD and not something mature like JavaScript”. Till we are considered at par with other mature languages, people will always blame us instead of programming challenges, so we have to go out of our way to ensure the person asking is getting their original problem fixed.