Answers

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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:

Launchpad Answers helps to solve these problems by:

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

Asking for help

Using Launchpad to find help is easy. First off, visit the Answers page for the project or distribution you're using.

Example: if you want help with the exaile media player, you'd visit https://answers.launchpad.net/exaile

Follow the Ask a question link and choose the language with which you're most comfortable.

{i} Tip: to improve your chances of getting an answer, choose a language that is marked with an asterisk. These languages have support volunteers whom Launchpad will notify of your question.

Next, type a summary the problem you're having. If you've ever reported a bug using Launchpad, you'll find the following steps quite familiar.

Let's say you're having trouble getting Exaile to minimise to the system notifications area of your Gnome panel (the systray). You enter the question:

Launchpad will now search for existing questions that look similar. If it finds any, it will show you them.

If Launchpad doesn't find any similar questions, or those it finds are unhelpful to you, you can write a more detailed description of your problem and submit your question.

What happens next?

Once you've added your new question, Launchpad emails anyone who's volunteered to be an answer contact for your language. They can then ask you for more information or offer an answer. Between you, you and the answer contacts should also change the question's reported status.

Question statuses

Each question can have one of six statuses:

Actions that change a question's status

Launchpad Answers for your project

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

First off, tell the world that your project uses Answers by selecting People can ask questions in Launchpad Answers on its Change details page at https://launchpad.net/<your-project>/+edit.

The most important step, though, is to ensure that questions about your project are seen by people who can help. This is where project answer contacts come in: they receive an email to let them know each time someone asks a question about your project.

Answer contacts

As an answer contact, you have two main jobs:

  • reviewing new questions
  • creating stock answers to frequently asked questions.

You or anyone else can volunteer to become an answer contact for a project. All you have to do is click the Set answer contact link on a project or distro's Answers overview page. If you're the admin of a team, you can also set that team to be an answer contact.

/!\ Important: when you become an answer contact, you're asking Launchpad to send you an email each time someone asks a question about that project or distro. If you make one of your teams an answer contact, you're subscribing each member to also receive that email. You should gain each member's permission before you make the team an answer contact.

Volunteering to be an answer contact is the easy bit. While Launchpad provides the mechanism to offer help to people, each project can choose for themselves how they deal with user support queries.

To find out about any such conventions, you should get in touch with one or two of the other answer contacts. Visit any of the project's Answers pages and expand the answer contacts box, in the left-hand column, for a full list.

Responding to new questions

Once you're an answer contact, Launchpad will email you each time someone posts a new question to your chosen project or distribution.

You can also see a list of questions awaiting an answer by using the Open filter towards the top of the page.

Email interface

Automatic question expiry

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Launchpad Answers take the best ele

That support is often offered through mailing lists, forums and IRC.

Many projects use mailing lists, forums and IRC to

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