Support Response Tips

Priorities of support:

1. Maintain the shared infrastructure
2. Help and teach people how to use the shared infrastructure
3. Teach and empower people to be self-sufficient with free and open source technology

Except with regard to priority 3 above, support is not intended for:

• Fixing people's web sites
• Fixing people's local area networks or broken local email clients, etc

Useful tips:

• Most questions are variations on questions that have already been asked. Be sure to check the faq and do a search of the site. Searching the entire site may turn up similar tickets providing ideas on how to answer
• Check the "Reported By" field. If you see an email address (it will be displayed in an obscured way, like joebob@... then it means the poster did not login, which means they will not see a comment box, which means they won't be able to respond. If you are asking them for more information, be sure to point out that they will need to login to respond and remind them that they can use their ssh/sftp or email user/password to login to the support site.
• If the poster does not identify the server they are working on or any other information that would make it easier to debug, don't be shy about asking
• Whenever possible, teach. It's not our job to fix people's web sites and teaching people how to fix their own websites is our last priority.