How To Ask for Help: Collaborating in Public Workspaces

TL;DR: Getting help from screenshots is not easy. There are often numerous things outside of a screenshot that could be wrong. Linking to your workspace will help save time and get you answers quicker while allowing us to troubleshoot for you.


Using Public Workspaces

When asking for help, there’s a much simpler and more effective way to get the solutions you need. Instead of going back and forth posting screenshots and trying different proposed solutions, consider sharing your collection publicly by using Postman public workspaces.

Create a public workspace

Create a public workspace (if one does not already exist) for your collection. You can call this “Help” or anything else.

Fork your collection to your new public workspace

Head over to the collection that you are looking for help with and fork it to your new public workspace.

:eyes: :key: Don’t forget to remove sensitive information like API keys and passwords! You can save the variable at the collection level but remove the values so that you don’t reveal your secrets. Consider using environment variables for sensitive data like this. :+1:

Leaving Comments

In your newly forked collection, you can switch to comment mode and begin highlighting which areas you are having trouble with. This is possible with not just in-line code comments, but also collections, folders, requests and more.

Resource: Commenting in Postman documentation.

Asking Your Questions

While posting on the forums, please still be sure to be as descriptive as possible in the post itself. The public workspace should not replace a clear request for help. Posts that just contain a workspace link will end up being removed.

Following these guidelines will help you get the answers that you need.

To Recap:

  • Use a descriptive title.

  • Choose a fitting category.

  • Tag your topic appropriately.

  • Introduce the problem you are having, how it was encountered and what previous solutions that you’ve attempted so far.

  • Links to your public workspace.

Be sure to link to your collection in the post!
Grab your public link to your collection and share it in your post. Remember, you must still be specific in the actual forum post itself.

Now go ahead and click that “create post” button!


How to Help Others

Feeling ready to help others with their questions? Maybe earn some forum badges and cool stuff like that? :raised_hands:

There’s a few ways that you can help:

  • Comment on the collection in question.
  • Fork the collection, troubleshoot in your own workspace and then submit a Pull Request with changes.
  • Replicate the issue or mock a different approach.
  • Share a public collection of your own or another resource that could point the original poster in the right direction.

There are some really great public workspaces that support learning more about Postman. If you need inspiration, check out these two examples: Postman Answers, built by the Postman team that organizes collections and code samples for FAQs on this very community forum and Postman Supernova @Praveendvd’s Postman Tricks & Tips workspace.

Happy posting!