What are the best practices for seeking help on a PHP forum without resorting to duplicate posts?

When seeking help on a PHP forum, it is important to provide a clear and concise explanation of the issue you are facing or the solution you are seeking. Avoid duplicate posts by thoroughly searching the forum for similar topics before creating a new post. If you are unable to find a solution, clearly outline the problem and provide any relevant code snippets or error messages. Example: Issue: I am trying to connect to a MySQL database using PHP but I keep getting a "Connection refused" error. Code snippet:

<?php
$servername = "localhost";
$username = "username";
$password = "password";
$dbname = "database";

// Create connection
$conn = new mysqli($servername, $username, $password, $dbname);

// Check connection
if ($conn->connect_error) {
    die("Connection failed: " . $conn->connect_error);
}
echo "Connected successfully";
?>