The concept behind Help.com is easy. This is an online community for asking questions and giving advice.
There is no limit to the types of questions you can ask. If another user has relevant experience or knowledge to share, they will volunteer a reply. The answers aren't always instant -- especially if research is involved -- so check back occasionally.
Ask any question you want. Discuss any topic. If your attitude is positive and constructive, any opinion is considered helpful and worth expressing.
There are few simple ways to get involved with helping others here:
Membership is free. All we ever require is a working email address from you. We do this in order to give you the full benefits of verified membership in the Help.com community. Once we verify your email address, your permanent membership account includes the following features:
Setting up an account is free and easy. You can immediately start off with a temporary account that allows you to ask questions and post replies - but this account will deactivate after 24 hours. At that point, any posts/replies you wrote will be removed from public view.
Step 1: In order to start using Help.com, write a question or reply to a post. Simply supply your email address* when asked. This sets up your temporary account.
* = Note, you must be 13 years of age or older to register.
Step 2: After replying or posting a question, you must do a one-time email verification of your account. If you give us a correct email address, we will email you a welcome letter that includes a secure login link that is unique to your account. (So don't show it to anyone else or they could impersonate you!) Simply click this login link and your account will become verified and registered as permanent.
Notice that this login link sends you to your Account Administration page. We do this because we strongly encourage people to fill in their profile information. The rest of the community is more likely to interact with you if they know a little about you and your interests.
We send you a secure login link in several welcome emails, but if you fail to see any of these, click this link to have another login link emailed to your in-box at any time:
An email will immediately be sent to you, however, if you see nothing for several minutes please check to see if the email was directed to your junk mail or spam folder instead of your in-box. Open the message and find the secure web link to your Account Administration page. As you click this link, your account will become permanent. It also jumps you to your Account Administration page.
All opinions are worthy of being heard - we only ask that the advice at least be given with the intention of genuinely trying to help others. Our goal is to make participation in discussions both civilized and informative. Users who engage is serious misbehavior that hurts the experience of others in the community can have their accounts blocked.
Your account can be banned if you do anything to hurt the usability of the Help.com for other community members. Here are the 5 easiest ways to get your account banned:
The Help.com staff has the final word on what is and is not bad behavior. If you believe another user is engaging in inappropriate behavior, do not argue with the other user. Simply alert a Help.com community moderator. He/she will investigate, give a warning if necessary, or block an account if a serious violation of community standards of conduct is confirmed.
If you have questions, concerns or worries about any Help.com website features or fellow community members, please leave a message in the Help.com community suggestion box and one of our moderators will get right back to you:
This is a great place to type brief text messages of thanks or encouragement for fellow users. You can access the Shoutbox in two ways:
Relationships develop as you get to know other users on Help.com. If you want to add a person to your Friends List you will be able to invite them to help answer questions you need help with.
You can add a person to your Friends List by clicking the add-a-friend icon located next to a username that appears in a reply to a post. (The icon looks like a person's head and shoulders, but with a green addition sign.)
Note that this will add the user to your list under the category of "favorites". The other user will now see you listed on his/her list as a "fan". If the other user agrees to be your friend, only then do you both appear as "friends" on each other's lists.
If a user is logged into Help.com they will have a green dot next to their name. The dot is red colored if the user is logged out.
Yes, adding links is fine. Including links to good online resources is a great way to help people.
It is illegal for Help.com to knowingly allow children younger than 13 years of age to join the Help.com member community. This rule exists because Help.com complies with the U.S. government's Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA).
Sometimes content can be sexually explicit and adult, but still be of legitimate help to people. Consequently, Help.com allows the content to exist while keeping it hidden from minors.
We ask all users to provide their year of birth. If they are 18 years of age or older, users will be able to see any post the Help.com staff has identified as being adult or sexually explicit. These same posts and replies will remain invisible to any user who is younger than 17 or younger or anyone who refuses to provide year of birth data.
At the same time, Help.com recognizes that sexual education or health questions are often appropriate for young teens. To the best of our ability, Help.com tries to ensure that these questions only get answered in a way that is scientific and serious minded. Anyone who is concerned about the appropriateness of a particular post or reply is encouraged to report the post directly to the community moderator.
In the footer of every page on the site is a red link title "Report" which you can click to send reports to the moderators at Help.com
You can still easily read new replies to a question after the post disappears from the Homepage. The Notices page is a great tool for tracking new replies.
If you write a question or a reply, your account's Notices page will automatically list links to every new reply that follows.
If you are interested in following a conversation even though you haven't written a reply, you can still do it by "subscribing to updates". To do this, click the link that appears under the text of a question on a post's webpage. As before, you'll see links to new replies under the Notices page.
Nobody is anonymous to the Help.com webmaster, but it is possible for you to post a question without revealing your username to fellow Help.com users. Here's how…
When you write a post, simply check the "Post Anonymously" box before you submit the post. By entering an email address and choosing to post anonymously, we will be able to keep you up-to-date on replies and activity without revealing your identify to other members of the community.
It is also possible to post anonymous replies. Notice the check box labeled "Reply Anonymously" located next to the button for submitting replies. If you check that box and then click the submit button, your reply will be anonymous. This option, however, is only available for registered and verified members.
Help.com uses automated filters to block from public view any post that includes a word or combination of symbols that can possibly be used in a manner that is insulting, pornographic, or threatening to others. This is why you might see a message telling you that your comment is awaiting approval.
If your comment is flagged as needing human moderation, your comment will remain invisible to public view until a Help.com staff member can review your comment for context and confirm if your intent was helpful or educational. Before the comment is made visible to the public, offensive words or phrases might be censored or changed.
During regular business hours for the U.S. East Coast, comments requiring staff approval are processed very quickly. However, at night and on weekends, approval can take several hours.
Longtime members of the Help.com community who establish a solid track record of providing advice without resorting to vulgar words eventually gain the privilege of not having their comments go through the automated filter.
While we're very sad to hear that you're leaving, we're happy to help. To close your account at Help.com visit the Settings tab in you Account Admin pages. Here you can disable emails we send out. Because no one can login as you, and we stop sending you emails, your account is effectively closed.
This does not delete any of your past posts or replies. It merely prevents any future activity with this account. It also still remains possible to reactivate your account by logging in and picking up where you left off.
Help.com is not a religious website and it is not affiliated with any religious group. However, Help.com is as appropriate a forum as any for general questions about religion, or questions that ask for a religious perspective on a problem. We welcome people who are inspired by their faith to help others and we recognize that many people find solutions through spirituality. At the same time, Help.com attempts to balance this with an equal recognition of everyone's right to not have religious philosophy forced upon them.
As a courtesy to our international community, we encourage Help.com users to follow guidelines for mentions of religion in their questions and replies.
Warning! We encourage our users to be skeptical and cautious of all promotions that appear as posts or replies. Help.com endorses none of the products or services that may appear on the website. Help.com will not vouch for the honesty or trustworthiness of any promoter or business.
That said, if the product or service is "helpful" to other users, registered users can promote their own products or services in their posts or replies. However, the following guidelines apply:
Users who violate promotion guidelines can have their accounts banned. Help.com reserves the right to delete any posts and replies that hurt the user experience on this site.
Help.com supports some very basic HTML formatting and a few special "directives" for making replies and posts:
We allow for several raw HTML tags to be used in posts and replies. Please be very careful to close your tags or else you may cause formatting problems on the page.
In addition to a few raw HTML commands, we've also included a few easy to use commands you can include in posts and replies to add enhanced functions to your text. Directives should be separated to their own line of text. (Small exception: the Poll directive may only be used once per post, and only in the post text itself.)
Shouts older than 30 days are not included in a user's shout count.
At Help.com, we discourage users from performing "blanket" invites to a post. If you are selective about who you invite to a post, invite selectively, and personalize the invitation message you will get a much better response rate.
Help.com promotes certain users to volunteer moderator positions. However, these moderators are not CNET Networks employees and do not necessarily represent our views. Additionally, volunteer moderators should never ask for personal information such as email address, passwords, credit card numbers, or social security numbers. If they do, please file a report about the action so that CNET may look into this breach.
Everytime you visit a website, the website you are visiting has a record of your IP address logged with it. This address is a machine coded number that helps uniquely identify your computer on the internet. Using a freely available database, Help.com can translate IP addresses to rough geographic areas (usually the nearest major metropoliton area).
Additionally, every user is given the option to "place themselves" using the provided account tools so they can change their geographic location. We appreciate it when users stay close to reality. If you really live in the Antarctic, that's pretty cool, but otherwise please don't place yourself too far from where you really live.
While we make a great effort to provide location data for every user, this is not always possible. In these cases, the users location is marked as "Unknown".
We also provide every user the option to hide their location. In these insstances, their location will be listed as "Undisclosed".
Boolean Mode is a way to narrow your search results down very precisely. Boolean mode allows you to add certain triggers to your search string which will change the outcome of the search. The three primary trigers in boolean mode are:
For example, if you search for "nuclear reactor" the end results are not guaranteed to have both words. You may get a post about "nuclear division" or a post about "reactor driven engines".
Using Boolean mode, your results can be forced to contain both "nuclear" and "reactor" by changing the search to "+nuclear +reactor". Now all of the results MUST have the words "nuclear" and "reactor". This is the + (plus) symbol at work.
Instead, let's say you want results about "nuclear division", and definitely know it's not going to include "reactor". Simply change the + (plus) to a - (minus) "+nuclear -reactor" and, as noted above, no search results will contain the word "reactor"
Perhaps, however, you wanted the phrase, "nuclear reactor". Rerun the search, but this time include quotemarks ( " ) to group the term: +"nuclear reactor" This search means "require the phrase 'nuclear reactor' in each result" and will get more targeted results.
Each anon user is assigned a unique "Anonicon" so that if several anonymous posters contribute to a thread, other user's can distinguish between the replies. Also, they're just fun!