Thunderbird/Support/GetSatisfaction/README

This is a DRAFT guide to the Get Satisfaction website as used by Mozilla Messaging for Thunderbird support. It is the first of a series of community-authored wiki pages on community support for Thunderbird. Please help by improving the contents of this page or giving suggestions in IRC at #gsfn on irc.mozilla.org

How to make Get Satisfaction work for you

1. Search first - Before creating a new support topic, search first to see if your question has already been asked and / or answered. You can do this at http://getsatisfaction.com/mozilla_messaging/searches
2. Give your topic a meaningful title - If you create a new topic, give it a descriptive title. For example, use "Can't send email on ACME Mail Provider SMTP server" instead of "help!!" When community members scan hundreds of support topics or when a search engine indexes topics, which title do you think is more helpful?
3. Provide lots of details about your problem - In the description of your problem, list your mail service provider, email protocol (POP or IMAP), operating system (Windows XP/Vista, Mac OS X, Linux, etc), Thunderbird version, extensions you have installed, what you did, what happened and what you expected. The more information you can provide, the better the community can help you. For a good general description of how to write a support request, check out this page: http://www.gerv.net/hacking/how-to-ask-good-questions/
4. Use short meaningful tags - The best tags are 1-3 words. These are most useful for indexing and grouping similar topics (such as "cannot send email", "cannot receive email"). Tags like "My Thunderbird has fallen and I can't get up" are not useful.

How to support others in the Thunderbird community

1. Answer questions - When you get help with a problem, share that information with others. Search for topics related to your problem and reply to them. This is especially useful with problems specific to mail providers. For example, if you solve a problem with Comcast, search for "Comcast" in other support requests and share your information.
2. Tag topics - Adding tags to topics helps other find answers by improving search engine results and by grouping related topics. For example, if a topic on the subject of email filters has a good answer, and you tag that topic and related open topics with the tag "configure filters", it will help people find the topic with the answer. 1-3 word tags are best, for example "cannot send email", "cannot receive email", etc. See the GS tagging convention wiki page for more information.
3. Bookmark or subscribe to a tag - You can subscribe to tags via RSS, or you can bookmark a tag and check back later to view activity. Then, when someone asks a question in your area of expertise, you will be alerted and can provide the answer. As an example, the feed for the tag "cannot send email" is: http://getsatisfaction.com/mozilla_messaging/tags/cannot_send_email.rss. Alternatively, you could bookmark http://getsatisfaction.com/mozilla_messaging/tags/cannot_send_email.