Providing support through Launchpad

Helping other users is a great way to make a contribution to free software projects. To this end, Launchpad offers tools to assist in the creation of a user support community around hosted products and distributions.

Can I help?

Anyone can help answer support requests; it requires only as much technical knowledge as a user has.

You will want to help with a product or distribution you know well. But you don't have to be an expert to give help: any patient person that regularly uses a particular application can usually provide good help to a new user. So don't hesitate to join the support community of your favorite applications.

Finding support requests to answer

The first step is to find somebody needing help. The best place to look is in the Support Tracker of the product or distribution you want to help with. You can access the Tracker from any page related to that product or distribution by clicking on the Support link.

The Support Tracker main page displays all the active support requests for that particular product or distribution. This includes not only requests waiting for an answer, but also requests that were already answered or that needs more information from the submitter.

To obtain a listing containing only the requests which needs an answer, click on the 'Open' link in the side action menu. You can then browse that list to find a support request to answer.

Tip: When you leave the mouse over a support request title, a small note will pop-up containing the beginning of the support request content. That way you don't have to click on every support requests to get their content.

Tip: If you are more familiar with some aspect of an application, you can enter some search keywords in the search box to restrict the listing to support requests containing these keywords. If you are looking for requests in Ubuntu related to the Konqueror web browser, for instance, you could enter konqueror as a search term.

Replying to a support request

Once you found a support request on which you can help, click on it to access the support request page. There are two kind of replies you can do on a support request.

1. First, if it is not clear from the support request description what is the problem, or if it doesn't contain enough context information to diagnose what the problem is, you should ask the submitter for more information. Enter your questions in the message box at the bottom of the screen and click on the Add Information Request. The person who posted the support request will receive a notification with your request for more information.

2. Sometimes you just know from the start how the user's problem could be solved. When this happens, you just enter the answer in the message box and click the Add Answer button. The user will receive an email notification with your answer. The support request status will be changed to Answered

letting others know that this support request already got an answer.

Handling follow-up

Once you added either an answer or an information request, it is the turn of the user who submitted the request to give feedback. He will do that either by providing the information you requested, by confirming your answer, or by informing of new developments in the problem.

To receive the user's reply by email, you need to subscribe to the request. You can subscribe yourself by clicking Subscribe link in the action menu.

If you choose not to subscribe to the request, you can still see that feedback was provided by looking at the Needs Attention report. To access that report, go to your Launchpad home page and click on the 'Support' link in the context menu. You will find the link to the Needs Attention report in the action menu.

• This report lists all the support requests on which you provided an answer or

a request for more information that received a reply. To read the reply, you will need to visit the support request page.

Registering as support contact

If you know well a product or distribution and like helping its users a lot, you might consider registering as support contact. When you register as support contact, you will receive an email notification for every new support requests submitted on the context you registered for. You will also receive automatically notifications for every change made on the support requests. In addition, you will be allowed to reject invalid support requests (support requests that are spam, duplicate, or not really related to the context.)

To register as support contact, first go to the product or distribution that you want to be a support contact of. Click on the Support link in the context menu. You then access the support contact registration page by following the Support Contact link in the action menu. On that page you can register yourself (or any of the team you are a member of) as support contact.

Tip: Being a support contact for a distribution usually involves receiving a lot of mail. You may also register as support contact only for one of the source package. You will then only receive support request notifications for those related to that application. For example, you could only receive support requests related to Firefox by registering as support contact on the firefox package in Ubuntu.

If ever you don't have time or interest anymore in being a support contact, you can visit the same page again to remove yourself from the support contact list.

Linking to bugs

It sometimes happens that the source of the problem described in a support request is related to a bug in the software. When this happen, it is a good idea to link the support request to the bug report, so that developers can know of an occurence of the bug. It also gives information to user who might have the same problem, they will be able to see the status of the bug from the support request page.

If an existing bug report is related to the support request, you can record the link by using the Link Existing Bug link in the action menu on the related support request. You simply enter the bug report number and click 'Link' to record the link.

If there is no existing bug report, you can create a new at the same time as recording the link by using the Create Bug Report link in the action menu on the related support request. You will then have to enter a summary of the bug report. The summary should describe the more succinctly possible the software defect. The bug report description default to the support request description, but it is probably a good idea to edit it to summarize the problem. You then click the Create Bug Report button to finish the process. The created bug report will be linked to the original support request.