Forum communication
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So you have a problem with installing/starting/using FlightGear, and someone pointed you here. Please take the time to read on. This article will explain how you should ask for support, and why.
The "support team" includes you
FlightGear doesn't rely on sales or license fees. FlightGear relies on having a base of contributors volunteering their time. This base includes the users, but in order to contribute, they need to be able to see something that bothers them not as something to complain about but as something to be investigated, understood and fixed.
Why?
FlightGear is developed by a fairly small community of volunteers, most of which enjoy understanding complex problems and fixing bugs. This community seems to be mostly comprised of "geeks", i.e. people using powerful gaming hardware, and Unix-based operating systems like Linux. This means, unfortunately, that newer features get tested on a very small variety of platforms that can't cover all of the end-users' cases (especially older Windows versions). Sometimes new features are only really tested once they're released, or once they're enabled by default.
Don't expect your problem to be obvious, actually it could very well be unknown. It's very likely that only few people, if any, have already reported your issue, or even experienced it. In fact, very often such issues are highly setup/system specific and depend on the type of hardware, operating system, drivers, settings - and sometimes even other software installed/running locally. All this is further complicated by the fact that unlike MS FSX, FlightGear is cross-platform software, which means that it needs to run across all supported hardware platforms and operating systems (Windows, Mac OSX, Linux).
Note that the fact that a bug is rare doesn't make it less important, but harder to solve for the lack of (good) data. In an open-source project like FlightGear without any funding, the developers depend on end-users to provide good feedback so that they can identify, troubleshoot and fix such issues. And they're grateful for everybody providing this very feedback in a constructive and helpful manner.
Troubleshooting is a hard job
Remotely troubleshooting problems is an extremely tedious process, however that gets more tricky because of people's tendency to act in a frustrated and sometimes even disrespectful way when reporting such problems.
Unlike a commercial software project, FlightGear has no funds to invest in development, QA testing or support for end-users. Commercial software companies will typically have dedicated teams testing new features across a huge variety of hardware/OS configuration.
The quality and timeliness of feedback
Lacking of resources, FlightGear depends on end-users providing good feedback to ensure that it keeps working for most people. And for features in development it also depend on timely feedback, too - given that developers are volunteers, they need sufficient time to troubleshoot and understand a bug, but also enough time to fix it. Preferably, several months prior to a release, not just during the few weeks shortly before release.
While the community have been providing a way for end-users to get involved in regularly testing FlightGear pre-releases provided via the FlightGear Build Server, very few users seem interested in getting involved in this, and even fewer people are actually providing bug reports via the issue tracker, unfortunately, so far.
This is why you need to be the developers' eyes and ears - they cannot see what you're seeing, and they cannot know what you have done.
When the frustration kicks in
Misunderstandings may arise during a forum discussion. After all, most people here aren't native English speakers. But fighting on the forums is just a huge waste of time and energy. That time is better spent on what our developers enjoy: creating software and new features. They are willing to help if provided with enough information on the problem at hand. Otherwise they wouldn't hang out on the forum. And they are not getting paid.
In conclusion...
Remember: you're the one having a problem with FG. You're asking for help, and you're not paying for the service. So,
- Be nice.
- Don't blame anyone.
- Try hard to provide the information you are asked for.
- If you are pointed to, e.g., the wiki articles, carefully read and try to understand them.
- Work through any suggested steps to troubleshoot the problem further.
- If you hit any roadblocks, tell exactly how far you proceeded and where you needed help.
- If you are not sure how to provide good feedback, better provide as much info as possible - i.e. through screen shots or Youtube videos.
- Don't expect immediate responses, sometimes it may take a few days to get back to you, especially during busy times (release preparations).
- Try to be respectful, deal with others the way you want to be dealt with.
You may of course disagree with someone who is most likely way more experienced with FlightGear than you are. But more often than not you'll be wrong.
Keep in mind that there's really only a handful of people on the forum who regularly provide support to newcomers, those are usually also the most knowledgeable people - and unfortunately, those are also the ones who are most likely busy with other aspects of FlightGear. It isn't uncommon that really tricky issues can really only be understood by people involved in developing the original feature, but those people will have little time to respond properly (if at all), and may also not show much courtesy when dealing with your issue, because we're really just trying to understand and fix problems, not trying to provide top-notch end-user support.