Support & this site, maybe refinement needed to https://ubuntu.com/support/community-support

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#1

Yes a clear reading of

Find community support

Ask Ubuntu and Ubuntu Forums are great sources of answers to common questions about installing, troubleshooting and optimizing Ubuntu. And if you want to speak with the Ubuntu Community directly, try one of these IRC channels or our discourse site.

doesn’t directly say this site is for Ubuntu community support, but https://ubuntu.com/support and like sites direct to that page, which links here and I suspect maybe a change is needed on ubuntu.com pages (esp. https://ubuntu.com/support/community-support ; needs a link break or something as it I suspect could be easily misunderstood as this site is for community support given heading).

Mentioned to see if anyone else agrees, its worthy of change, thus reporting etc.

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#2

My opinion is that change might not help much.

The vast majority of folks do seem to read, ponder, and comprehend. They already go to the right places, so I think the overall messaging seems proper. We’re talking about a paltry few, perhaps one per day…or a bit fewer, who show up in Discourse.

Of that paltry few, we don’t know how many came from that page. But all of them definitely saw (and ignored) the Big Purple Box that clearly stated “This is not for technical support questions” before they created their account.

The conclusion I draw is that the folks who missed the clear, unambiguous message are unlikely to be affected by other, more subtle re-wording.

Of course, I could be quite wrong, too.

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#3

I followed the link (in private mode so no history) & yes it is clear as you state. If it was me, I’d return & re-read why I went to the page… but that’s not everyone. Nothing though will work for everyone, and the support requests here appear sparse now anyway.

Thanks @ian-weisser

#4

If anyone has suggestions on how we can make it more obvious that this site is NOT FOR SUPPORT I’d love to hear it. Maybe Blinking text or something? Problem is, sometimes people are very “selfish” (for want of a better word) when looking for support “I don’t care, just help me, my system is broken!”, so it can be frustrating.

We did have the site setup to prevent brand new users from creating posts and that nearly completely removed all support requests. But as soon as we opened that up again to allow people to join and make suggestions / requests, the support posts came “flooding” in again. :frowning:

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#5

The number of off-topic support questions now is extremely low (in my opinion, maybe I’m not seeing many; or it’s the new user rules Alan suggests)

My point was just the two sentences read as if they were one. Not helped with the second sentence starting with an “And”, or maybe it needed a “\n” or line-break between them so it wasn’t linked as easily by readers.

Ask Ubuntu and Ubuntu Forums are great sources of answers to common questions about installing, troubleshooting and optimizing Ubuntu.

If you want to speak with the Ubuntu Community directly, try one of these IRC channels or our discourse site.

maybe was what I was trying to suggest (or ideally re-worked by someone with better writing skills than me)

It was no magic bullet (I don’t think there is one), something had me follow a link to that page, and I saw the link to here & suggested what I saw as minor-misjudgement potential for users wanting support

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@popey and the Mods
#6

I’d recommend filing a bug using the link at the bottom of the page :D.

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#7

ack and thanks :slight_smile:

https://github.com/canonical-web-and-design/ubuntu.com/issues/8654

#8

I’ve just merged a fix for this. It should go live within a few days.

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