FAQs

Feel free to ask any question related to anything Deaf.
The site moderators, will add / edit / delete categories as we progress. Questions that need additional work or that are not a good fit for this site may be put on hold by experienced community members. While questions are on hold, they cannot be answered, but can be edited to make them eligible for reopening.

Please look around to see if your question has been asked before. It’s also OK to ask and answer your own question. Questions that are too broad, unclear, incomplete, or primarily opinion-based may be closed by the community until they are improved.

You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.

When asking a question, people will be better able to provide help if you provide code/scenario/background that they can easily understand and use to reproduce the problem. This is referred to by community members as creating a minimal, reproducible example (reprex), a minimal, complete and verifiable example (mcve), or a minimal, workable example (mwe). Regardless of how it's communicated to you, it boils down to ensuring your code that reproduces the problem follows the following guidelines:

Your examples should be…

…Minimal – Use as little code/issue as possible that still produces the same problem
…Complete – Provide all parts someone else needs to reproduce your problem in the question itself
…Reproducible – Test the code/issue you're about to provide to make sure it reproduces the problem

Leave a comment on the question itself calling for it to be reopened.

Check the guidelines and submit again.

The fundamental goal of closing duplicate questions is to help people find the right answer by getting all of those answers in one place. This does not mean that every duplicate will immediately be closed; we love (some) dupes. There are many ways to ask the same question, and a user might not be able to find the answer if they're asking it a different way.

Once you have posted too many poorly-received questions or answers, you will be banned from posting more, and you will see the error message.

If a post was poorly-received (downvoted or closed), that will continue to count against your account even if the post is deleted!

Asking questions can be difficult, and we want all of our users to have the best possible experience on the site. You've asked a number of questions, some of which were not very well-received by the community; it's time to take a short break and have a closer look around the site.

Plan your question, make it short and relevant with background or steps to replicate.

Decide if the answer is helpful, and then...

- Vote on it (if you have earned the appropriate voting privilege). Vote up answers that are helpful and well-researched, and vote down answers that are not. Other users will also vote on answers to your question.

- Accept it. As the asker, you have a special privilege: you may accept the answer that you believe is the best solution to your problem.

To accept an answer:

Choose one answer that you believe is the best solution to your problem.
To mark an answer as accepted, click on the checkmark beside the answer to toggle it from greyed out to fill in.
You may change which answer is accepted, or simply un-accept the answer, at any time.
Accepting an answer is not mandatory; do not feel compelled to accept the first answer you receive. Wait until you receive an answer that answers your question well.

Please do not add a comment on your question or on an answer to say "Thank you". Comments are meant for requesting clarification, leaving constructive criticism, or adding relevant but minor additional information – not for socializing. If you want to say "thank you," vote on or accept that person's answer, or simply pay it forward by providing a great answer to someone else's question.