What is a "clue" in the context of troubleshooting?

A clue is a piece of information that can lead the developers to potentially diagnose the problem on a development environment. The effort to obtain a clue is often non-trivial and it requires some level of knowledge about "scientific method", in order to be able to recreate the issue in different environment.

Because the effectiveness of a system depends on many factors that a piece of software cannot control (for example: damaged hardware or obsolete network cables, conflicting software such as antiviruses, corrupted operating system, incorrect driver, or improper user operation), we ask users to provide clues before we can provide technical support.

Without a clue, it could take an amount of unreasonable time and resource for the developers to try to help on an issue. So we ask the users to contribute a certain amount of effort to find a clue before asking us to offer support on an unknown issue.

The bottom line here is, you need to give us "a point" of possible cause to look into, and not "an area to search", before we are able to help you. To "search an area" is too labor-intensive, which will also be explained in this article..

See also

• Why can't you solve individual user's technical problem? If so, isn't this forum quite useless?
• What is "actionable information" for problem reporting?
• Troubleshooting guide