Description

The first way to contribute to the mod_perl community is by following the mailing list and helping out anyone else having problems.

Answering Questions

Since mod_perl is an open source technology, its main support facility are the mailing lists. Therefore it's very essential to support users and developers by sharing your mod_perl and related knowledge through answering questions and submitting interesting posts that enrich the community's knowledge in the related topics.

You don't have to be a guru to be a very valuable person to the mod_perl community. Through answering questions you learn a lot by yourself and eventually become a guru too. Actually, by doing a little research for people (which they should have been doing themselves), you'll learn of things you had never even thought of!

Helping Navigating the Documentation

mod_perl is one of the few open source projects that is bundled with a lot of comprehensive documentation. And although the documentation is well indexed, it can be hard to find the right piece of information, especially for a novice mod_perl user. If you point someone to the existing documentation, please try to point her to the specific URL containing the information, and not just to "the mod_perl documentation" in general.

Pointing to Past Discussions

Very often there will come up questions that have been answered before. Instead of replicating answers, do everyone a favor and retrieve the URL of the discussion from the archives, replying with that if it answers the question or at least helps along the way.

Obeying the Email Etiquette

Do not forget the important mailing list guidelines. Whenever posting to the list, you should be aware of these and follow them as best as possible. Furthermore, if some users seem to not be aware of it, don't hesitate about pointing them to that place.