What should we do with questions about contract verification on Etherscan?

Question

They appear regularly and many go unanswered. In many cases a verification input is wrong: solc version, optimization settings, different source code, constructor parameters; and in a very few cases it is something wrong on Etherscan side.

Usually possible answers are specific to the contract deployed and they might not work for a different contract. Also having a lot of similar questions makes it harder to find an answer that might work in a particular situation.

• Closing them as a third party issue.
• Chose a question with general instructions, and mark new question as a duplicate.
• Do nothing.
• Do something else.

Answer 1

Both first suggestions are good.

Chose a question with general instructions, and mark new question as a duplicate.

Second one is more work but might be more helpful. The details you provided are good so if there is a question where you have a really good answer, we can close many of the others as duplicate. A suggestion might be to also include something like this:

"If this answer does not help you and you still really need help, open a new question with ALL the following details

• solc version
• ...
• ...
• gist.github.com link to the source code"

Another suggestion for the answer is "You can also look at similar problems others faced by clicking this tag contract-verification."

Answer 2

Thanks for bringing that up. I've had some difficulty myself when verifying the source code for a library, both via their API and via their GUI.

I found out in the process that etherscan are really having trouble coping with all the questions they get bombarded with, mostly related to lost funds, but they were quite helpful when I contacted them directly. I had to pass at least two stages of assurances that my question was not related to lost funds.

So maybe the first option is not too bad, since etherscan really did a good job solving my issue together with them via email conversation.

I also noticed in one of the questions on this forum that people from etherscan did actually answer some of the posts. Maybe its worth contacting them via their contact form, assuring that its not to do with lost funds.