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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:
- 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.
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.
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:
How do I minimise Exaile to the systray?
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 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. Launchpad will then email you whenever your question changes, such as when someone suggests an answer.
Based on your actions and theirs, Launchpad will change the question's status, to help other people to see what action, if any, they should take.
Question statuses
Each question can have one of six statuses:
Open: this question needs an answer, either because it is new or because a previous answer didn't completely solve the problem.
Needs information.
Answered: someone has answered the question but the original reporter hasn't yet said whether or not it solved their problem.
Solved: one of the answers to the question has solved the original reporter's problem.
Expired: Launchpad automatically expired this question because it stayed in the Open or Needs information state, without activity, for more than two weeks.
Invalid.
Actions that change a question's status
Someone, other than the reporter, has asked for more information. When the question's status is Open, this will change it to Needs information.
The reporter provides more information on the problem. When the status of the question is Needs information, this will change it back to Open.
Someone answers a question. When the status of the question is Open or Needs information, this will change it to Answered.
The original reporter tells Launchpad they have found a solution. The status moves to Solved.
The reporter confirms an answer given by another user. The status moves to Solved.
After receiving an answer, the reporter replies that the problem still occurs. This reverts status to Open.
Two weeks have passed without a change to the question. If the question is in the Open or Needs information state, Launchpad's robot - the Launchpad Janitor - will automatically mark the question as Expired.
An answer contact or administrator rejects a question which contains spam or is a duplicate. This changes the status to Invalid.
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. Next, encourage members of your community to use Answers. In particular, you should consider encouraging members of your community to become answers contacts.
Next steps
If you're already familiar with a piece of software, and want to help other people use it, you can offer support using Launchpad.
