Technical support on the list

[gord campbell]

You might say I'm in the Answer business, although it doesn't make me a
dime. I've been doing the Q&A column in Full Circle Magazine for a
couple of years.

I use Google a LOT to try to track down answers. Askubuntu hardly ever
appears in my Google searches. I agree that, on average, it has much
better answers than other locations, but the activity level is just too
low.

When I find an answer, 75% of the time it's in the Ubuntu Forums. When I
find an unhelpful response, 80% of the time it's in the Ubuntu Forums.
I'm surprised how many blogs there are which contain helpful posts: "I
ran into this situation, and here's how I solved it."

The Community Docs are sometimes helpful, although they contain a lot of
obsolete material.

Helping people in the mailing list is A Good Thing, but it's ephemeral.

As to the question of explaining things for noobies, I probably try more
than most people. I shudder every time I tell someone, "click on the
Dash," and almost always explain what that means -- yet it's a
fundamental part of Ubuntu at this point. Mostly, I assume a person has
used XP, so they are looking for the Start menu.

It's a real eye-opener to see how many people don't know how to use
Google. "I have a Gazorks 123x and it has such-and-such problem..." And
when I Google "Gazorks 123x Linux," the solution appears before my eyes.


"The one truly great support site for Ubuntu stuff I say would be
AskUbuntu [1]. It's really awesome, but you would still have to
manually wade through the hundreds of questions to find exactly what
you're looking for; it doesn't mean it's been answered already..."