Support vs. Contact Us

[MDGarcia]

Greetings:

Some of you might be confused about when to use the Contact Us dialog on the archive or when to submit a ticket to support. Let this post explain a little bit about why we have multiple methods to get stuff resolved:

• Contact Us goes to Steff's email - You use Contact Us for site policy violations or helpful suggestions.
  
• Support goes to my email, but I also get paged on my phone- You use Support when you believe something is broken on the archive, forums, blogs, email, etc. or you have a "how do I" question that isn't answered in the Knowledgebase.
  

Steff does a lot of work on the site, but she is not the server administrator. She cannot fix backend stuff like MySQL or disk-level problems. I can. So, don't use Contact Us to report errors. It's quicker to use the ticket system.

Also, please DO NOT use PMs in lieu of a support ticket. Why? I use the ticket system to track all issues for historical record. I clean out my PM box regularly to prevent hitting the PM limit, so I lose that history. The ticketing system, on the other hand, has no limit. Occasionally, I will use the ticket system to see if there are any breakage trends. A great example of this usage is:

1. Back in April, SMF was having systemic issues.
   
2. Both tickets and PMs/direct emails were being opened/sent on this (25).
   
3. Escalated to SMF development, since we are charter members.
   
4. SMF could not resolve since the install was straddled.
   
5. We switched to IPS without losing (most of our) data.
   
6. Problem resolved, tickets closed.
   
7. Happy face for me.
   

In short, the PM to ticket ratio lately has gotten too high for me to not post this. I'm also going to change my personal policy to not respond to PMs that should obviously be a support ticket. Please use the support ticket system. Please. I do this for free (for the most part), please help me out by following this simple policy. Please!

Thanks!

MDg