ChortleVision

Well its time for my half-yearly plee for help with support requests, for those not in the know there are four main avenues of getting support with ubuntu and ubuntu related software, #ubuntu on freenode, the ubuntu forums, the various mailing lists and finally the launchpad answer support tracker. On the support tracker post ’support tickets’, in that they detail their problem and helpful people like you and me get to sit there and figure out whats wrong.

the beauty of this system is that you can ‘pick and choose’ what you want to answer, just stick to your knowledge base so to speak, kind of like a mailing list in that regard (but a bunch more useful for support). unfortunately there are not that many of us that really deal with the support tracker and that means that around release day we get utterly swamped and most of the support requests remain ‘open’. Obviously this isn’t a great way to get in new users.

If you want to help out with these support requests (which we could really use your help on, especially for the next week or three) you’ll need to go to http://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu - there you will find a list of support requests, all you have to do is click on one that interests you and muck in :) you can also go to your user page (for example, for me that’s https://launchpad.net/~gordallott) and click on the ‘answers’ tab at the top to get a list of support requests that you have asked / replied to, that way you can keep track of the people you are helping. (just check that page once in a while)

I find its best to check the main support request page maybe three times a day and answer a few, its only fifteen minutes out of my day and it helps people out immensely (you know how much you needed someones help once :P)

Every answer you give contributes to your launchpad karma as well which is nice :)