Thunderbird/Support/GetSatisfaction/README

This is a DRAFT barebones / 1 pager guide to Get Satisfaction as used by Mozilla Messaging for Thunderbird Support. First of a series of community authored wiki pages on community support for Thunderbird. Please help by editing the page or giving suggestions in IRC in #gsfn on irc.mozilla.org

Top 5 Ways Users can make Get Satisfaction better

1. search for an existing topic first - Instead of hurriedly filing a support topic, please take a deep breath and do a quick search first (it's easy and painless :-) !) and see if somebody else has already answered your question or asked it (in most cases somebody has!). You can do this at http://getsatisfaction.com/mozilla_messaging/searches
2. meaningful title - If you decide to create a new topic, then please use a meaningful title e.g. "Can't send email on ACME Mail Provider SMTP server" instead of the not very helpful "help" - Try to imagine yourself and fellow support community members scanning hundreds of support topics or a search engine indexing topics, which is more helpful?
3. tell us your mail service provider, email protocol (POP or IMAP), OS (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 about your problem, the faster the community can help you. Guessing :-) takes too much valuable time. This link is a good general, not specific to GS and Thunderbird, overview of how to write up a good topic: http://www.gerv.net/hacking/how-to-ask-good-questions/
4. use meaningful 1-3 word tags - 20 word tags aren't helpful, 1-3 word tags are best for indexing and for finding topics e.g. "cannot send email", "cannot receive email", NOT "My Thunderbird has fallen and I can't get up"

Top 5 Ways Users can help support others in the Community

1. search for topics that others have helped you with and reply to them - especially for mail provider specific instructions e.g. say you use the mail provider "Comcast" in your city and somebody helps you successfully, well then you can help others since you are now the expert on "Comcast" - just search for "Comcast" and help others http://getsatisfaction.com/mozilla_messaging/searches
2. tag topics that are missing tags - if you tag a support topic with a meaningful tag (especially ones with good answers), that will help others find the answered topic and possibly get their answer too thereby reducing the support load on the community; again 1-3 word tags are best for indexing and for finding topics e.g. "cannot send email", "cannot receive email", etc. See our GS tagging convention wiki page for more.
3. bookmark a tag OR subscribe to a tag and answer questions later - subscribe to tags via RSS or via a bookmark. If RSS then check out the tag RSS feed when you read your RSS and reply to topics you can answer. If a bookmark consider hitting that bookmark when you have a free moment and then replying to topics you can answer. e.g. the feed for the tag "cannot send email" is: http://getsatisfaction.com/mozilla_messaging/tags/cannot_send_email.rss and you can bookmark http://getsatisfaction.com/mozilla_messaging/tags/cannot_send_email