Welcome to Elastic's Discussion Forums! We're glad you're here. 
You can use these forums to ask questions about any of Elastic's products, share tips and tricks you've learned with your fellow users and keep up to date on the latest news in our Announcements forum.
Private Messages
While our forums support the use of private messages, we urge you to ask your questions directly in the forums. If you ask you question publicly, everyone using the forum will have the benefit of learning the answer. Private messages should be used sparingly and only to communicate about private matters, for example when you are invited to send a private message to another user who would like further information about an error message that may reveal confidential information about your company's infrastructure.
Users who continue to send private messages after another user has asked them not to do so may be banned from the forums entirely. Be kind - ask your question in a public topic!
Using the Forums Solely via Email
For people who generally prefer mailing lists to forums, we've got you covered. You can interact with this forum solely via email by:
- Setting up your user preferences so that you receive messages posted to each forum category/thread within it as often as you would like.
- Starting discussions by sending your email to the appropriate mailing address per category, e.g. discuss+elasticsearch@elastic.co for question related to Elasticsearch. All category mailing addresses have been documented for you; if you do not see a category mailing address listed its because the category is restricted to posting for employees of Elastic Co.
Sharing Code Snippets or Error Messages
Last but not least, if you'd like to share long code snippets, error messages, log files, etc., please create and share a link to a GitHub gist, or pastebin or similar site, in your thread. Gists are much easier to read!
Reporting Issues with Using the Forum
Please post issues with using the forums, such as being unable to reply to a forum thread via email, a post disappearing, etc., in the Meta Elastic category. Our team monitors this category so we can help you if you are having problems.