Meta question about using this forum

I'm stuck in my script, I run it, it doesn't give me what I want, the resulting plot of my algorithm gives unexpected and wrong results. I doubt Stack Overflow is the best place to solve a little bug in a little script, only posts that can be useful in the future are voted and answered properly. I don't know where to get help, is it in this forum? Should I copy/paste my script and join captures of my plots and put everything in a question? I can't ask a specific question because I have an error in the logic of what I've written, not with a particular line of the script. Can you please help? What are my options here?

[Jon]

Yes, this is a good place for posting your problem. Please provide a subject line that gives a high level description of the problem, in the body describe in detail what you are trying to do and what problems you are experiencing. Copy and paste the full text of any error messages you get. If possible provide a simple, standalone, runnable example that demonstrates the problem. Depending upon how long your example code is either copy and paste it using the "code" button in the MATLAB answers toolbar, or attach it using the paperclip.

You can browse around the forum to see the kinds of questions others have posted, and the responses they got.

[Abdallah]

Thank you, thank you, you gave me hope.

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

The questions here that get the most response are the ones that post code and error message, and data files help too.

Questions that do not have an error message but post code do sometimes get a response if the code is an implementation of equations and an image of the equations is posted.

The longer code is, and the more the post starts to be "Something is wrong somewhere in my program", the fewer the people who are likely to respond. Posts that are more specific in describing what is wrong are more likely to get responses.

When a post comes down to asking the volunteers to research a topic that they may never have dealt with before, read up on the theory, and then read through mostly-uncommented code to figure out how it works and how that differs from the theory... volunteers mostly don't bother. They are much more likely to bother when given something quite specific to deal with, like an error message.

For example over the years I have ended up helping several people with power systems problems. I know very little about the theory of power systems, but given code and error message I can help trace back why (for example) an index is out of range.

[Abdallah]

I see, thanks.