Launchpad Help > Answers

Overview

Mailing lists, web forums and IRC are great places to find help with free software. Usually, you'll find someone who can answer your question or, at the very least, point you in the direction of a useful web page.

These methods of finding and giving help have a couple of shortcomings, though:

• there's no way to track the progress of a question
• knowledge about the software is spread across different places.

Launchpad Answers helps to solve these problems by:

• tracking user questions in a similar way to bug reports
• notifying volunteer support contacts of new questions
• building a searchable knowledge base of good answers
• allowing people to ask questions and offer support in different languages.

It also serves as a simple ticketing system for tracking admin requests.

More about Launchpad Answers

• Asking for help: find out how to use Launchpad to get help with software.

• Offering help: how to help other people and become an ..answer contact.

• Answer syntax parsing

Launchpad Answers for your project

If you're a project owner, you can use Launchpad Answers to provide support to the users of your software and to build a knowledge base about your software.

First off, activate Answers for your project by selecting People can ask questions in Launchpad Answers on its Change details page at https://launchpad.net/<your-project>/+edit. Now, people ask for help using Launchpad.

Next, encourage members of your community to use Answers. In particular, you should consider encouraging members of your community to become answer contacts.