# Before you report a bug

The SLF4J community consists of those who use SLF4J and its implementations, help answer questions on discussions lists, contribute documentation and patches, and those who develop and maintain the code for SLF4J and its implementations. Almost all those who assist on a day to day basis resolving bug reports do this for a wide variety of reasons, and almost all of them do this on their own time.

Many bugs reported end up not being a bug in SLF4J, but are due to misconfiguration, problems caused by installed applications, the operating system, etc.

Before reporting a bug please make every effort to resolve the problem yourself. Just reporting a bug will not fix it. A good bug report includes a detailed description of the problem and a succinct test case which can reproduce the problem.

### Review the documentation

Review the documentation for the version of component you are using. The problem you are having may already be addressed in the docs.

### Search the mailing list archives

It is very likely you are not the first to run into a problem. Others may have already found a solution. Our various mailing lists are likely to have discussed this problem before.

### Search JIRA

Please search the bug database to see if the bug you are seeing has already been reported. The bug may have already been fixed and is available in a later version. If someone else has reported the same bug, you could add supporting information to help reproduce and resolve the bug.

- Search for SLF4J bugs

### Reporting a bug

Only after you have exhausted the aforementioned steps, should you file a formal report in JIRA, our bug tracking system.

Please make sure you provide as much information as possible. Its very hard to fix a bug if the person looking into the problem can't reproduce it.