Your first community contribution

The easiest way to start helping is to answer a question. You do not need to be an expert. If you got something working in your own home, you can help someone else get there too.

Go to the community forum and sign up for a free account.

The forum has a short guide on how to ask a good question. It is written for people asking for help, but reading it tells you what a good question looks like, and what to ask for when a question is missing details.

Open the latest topics and look for a question without replies, in an area you know. Your own setup is the best guide: if you use Zigbee, look for Zigbee questions. If you write a lot of automations, look in the configuration category.

Do not worry if you cannot find something right away. Read a few topics, and come back tomorrow. New questions arrive all day.

• Answer the question that was asked. If you need more information first, ask for it, like the Home Assistant version, the installation type, or the log messages.
• Share configuration as text in a code block, not as a screenshot. In YAML, the spacing matters.
• Link to the documentation where it helps, so the person learns where to look next time.
• Be honest when you are not sure. "This worked for me, but I have not tried it with your device" is a perfectly good answer.

Check back on the topic. If your answer helped, the person who asked can mark it as the solution, so the next person with the same problem finds it right away. If it did not help, keep going, or let someone else pick it up. Both are fine.

• Read Welcome newcomers. A lot of questions come from people who just installed Home Assistant.
• Join the Discord server for quicker, live conversations.
• Learned something while answering? The documentation could probably use it too. See Writing docs.