By the nature of language, all problems can be described in countless different ways, so there is never any guarantee that you will find all similar cases when trying to search for it. You just need to try out a few best phrases and keywords and see if any of the discussed topics sound like they’d fit your problem. If not - open a new topic. Whenever I or other senior members see any topic that we know has already been discussed in the past, we try to cross-reference these topics.
It is all thoroughly described in Posting guidelines in #Help channel. Different problems require different set of information, so it’s not possible to anticipate all kind of problems and questions. Answering all questions mentioned in the guidelines usually is enough to consider the post “well done”.
This varies from topic to topic, but usually the more you can share about the problem the better. In some cases, a small code snippet is enough to identify the problem, in other cases combining all 4 of these is not enough. Always providing as much info and context as you can is the best you can do. People responding to the topic are usually eager to ask more follow-up questions if this is not enough.
What you’re asking for is basically a set of tutorials, which you can find plenty online (some even here on the Forum). Every project is different in its core. You can’t make a universal set of instructions for all projects, so any “general guidelines” are pointless.
Yes.
Yes, they are updated with each version. If there is any problem after the new release - you can report it, or even submit a PR yourself. It’s open source after all.