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. 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