How To Support

[misskat]

Hellooooo!

I've gotten some feedback that the Support process from the volunteer side is opaque and confusing. I, along with some other folks, are looking to change that. The first step in this multi-step process is to find out what the people who do Support are actually using.

To this end, please take a minute and post your most-used links, extensions, and helpful tools in the comments here.

Thanks!

-Kat

Comments

[misskat]

I use the hell out of Clippings, which is a Firefox extension that saves bits of text. I have some stock answers in there, like my response for feed changes, but I also keep handy URLs, like the beta page, the lost info page, and a few others in there. Makes things a little quicker.

I also have a few of fu's Greasemonkey scripts installed. You can find those here: http://afunamatata.com/greasemonkey/ . I use the console one the most, but others may find different extensions more handy.

[misskat]

http://www.dreamwidth.org/admin/ is also useful.

[trixieleitz]

Seconding the rec for Clippings and fu's GM scripts. When I was doing LJ support I had some other scripts as well, from sophie IIRC (and I do apologise if I've misattributed there!), but I'm not sure if they work on DW. There was one which let you type [faq###] in the response and it would expand to the full FAQ link which I used All The Time. There was another which placed links next to each screened that, when clicked, selected it in the "select for approval" menu, which was also super-useful to me as an SH. And a Preview button which let me display the response on the page before I submitted it, which for some reason was far more effective for typo-hunting than looking at what I'd typed in the form.

I also used URL Link, which lets you customise text added to strings that you want to open as URLs. For example, if the user has typed the username of someone else's account and you want to go to the corresponding RSS feed to check for "don't show on reading pages", you can select the username and use URL Link to add .dreamwidth.org/data/rss to the URL. Or if they are asking about a community they want to join, you can check the comm's membership settings by adding the gubbins that makes it into a profile link. That sort of thing.

[sevillana]

I feel like I'm not diligent enough. I typically rely on a lot of general knowledge after being a user this long, and for the massive amounts I don't know, I peek through the FAQs myself (often it can be found) or look back through other answered support requests to see what the answer was.

[denise]

just chiming in here to say there's nothing wrong with that! nobody's expected to know the answer to every request -- even i have to look things up in the faqs occasionally (and sometimes wind up having to go diving in the code if it's a particularly obscure thing), and general troubleshooting for people who are having weird problems is more an art than a science anyway.

never feel guilty for not knowing everything! nobody knows everything; that's why screened answers exist in the first place, to make sure at least one other person gets a look at stuff. :)

[anaraine]

I mostly keep a tab open in Notepad++ for my bits of frequently used text and/or links (because I always have it open for doing other things) but I visit the What Goes Where page when I can't remember which private category a request should be going to.

I haven't actually used the IRC channels for getting help, but I hang around to listen and would feel comfortable poking someone for assistance.

[sevillana]

I find it also helps a little that I was part of the great RP migration awhile back; it means I know the typical things that part of the userbase runs into frequently - and I have a lot of contacts I can ask quickly if I remember they came up against an issue, too. (For example, I couldn't remember where to go to convert paid time back to points and someone on my rp contacts gave me the link.)

[denise]

that's the best part of support! when you look at the board and go "hey, wait, i know that, i just ran into that last week." (i've said for ages that the best teacher of any particular thing is somebody who just learned it themselves; that way you know what questions are likely to come up.)

and hey, what you describe there is kind of exactly how i got into livejournal support, way back when -- in 2001, i was working 13-hour overnight shifts in a datacenter, and the only time we had something to do was if something broke and we had to keep ourselves busy otherwise. it is very boring at 4am if nothing is broken! so i wandered into lj support. and now, twelve years later, here we are on dreamwidth. ;)

(i went from "hey, i remember figuring that out!" to "hm, people are having problems with this, let me go figure out the answer" to "ugh, this process is totally inefficient, i need to make a few suggestions on how to improve it" to "what do you mean, you want to put me in charge?" and the rest is history.)

[denise]

fyi, if you're ever not sure about which private cat a request should go in, just kick it to accounts with an IC explaining why you're not sure where it goes, and i'll take care of getting it to the right place from there. (i say accounts because it really should be named 'shit rah needs to look at', but i have notifs on for all of the private cats and you can really use any of them.)

[anaraine]

Good to know!

[azurelunatic]

Yes: "kick private and let Rah sort it out" is totally a valid life choice when the urgent need is getting it off the public boards.

[sevillana]

Experience can lead to interest. I have to admit since LJ Abuse helped me about a particularly persistent e-stalker, I've been vaguely interested in doing Abuse help - but I'm not even sure what all that would require or how to even go about trying to become involved on that end.

[denise]

right now our ToS volume is pretty low, and like 90% of it is the same damn four things reported over and over again, so we don't really need more people. but that might change in the future, who knows!

i ran the lj abuse team for years and years, and the skills required were pretty basic, but the biggest thing i was looking for was a steady, calm personality -- ability to handle people hurling the most vile invective you can think of at you, ability to read/view a whole variety of horrible shit without it getting to you, ability to keep your cool (and a sense of humor) in high-pressure environments, etc. hopefully it won't get to that point here on dw for a long time (if ever!), but that's probably what we'll be looking for if/when we want to expand the ToS team on dreamwidth, too.

[sevillana]

Sounds about right; I'll keep a general eye out for the future.

Relevant to the support convo, I should mention I also keep a bookmark folder with links to info/requests I know come up frequently (converting paid time to points, how to set up a notif for if a username becomes free, etc.)

[ninetydegrees]

What Goes Where because I find some cats very obscure, FAQs and FAQ Search (and how much do I wish we could do that ajaxingly from Support?), Bugzilla and Support History, Support notifications, a text editor when I need to think things over (on my computer or my mobile phone if I'm not at home), dw_support, dw_support_training although very rarely because well it's seldom used, changelog and other dw_ comms to track fixes, answers about things which aren't necessarily documented elsewhere. I used to keep all my approved answers in Scrivener, sorted by cats, but I stopped doing that because it's a poor substitute for searching and tagging. I also have some of D's answers/comments bookmarked. Again poor substitute. :/

Edit: admin/priv to check if someone can read ICs; public layers, layer creator, Web Developer extension for styles requests; Textarea Cache extension; http://downrightnow.com for LJ status; dreamhack and various accounts on DW and LJ to reproduce issues.