introductory

Since its release, this guide has been widely referenced and distributed. We've noticed that many open source projects and tools have linked to this guide on their official websites or in their help files, which is very encouraging behavior-it's one of the reasons we designed and wrote this guide in the first place: to help users learn how to seek technical support more effectively.

This Is Not a Technical Support Portal

However, we must emphasize an extremely important fact:

**This guide does not provide practical support services for any particular project! **

If you are the administrator of a project and wish to reference this guide on your project's website or in your documentation, be sure to include this statement prominently in the link. Don't assume that users will automatically understand this - the reality is: they won't.

Why it's important to be clear

We emphasize this point so much because we have experienced first-hand the consequences of not declaring it: we are constantly receiving requests from all over the world, often uninformed, unspecified, and even taking it for granted that we are responsible for solving all the technical problems they encounter. Clearly, this is not a responsibility we are willing to take on at all.

Please understand that we have written this guide to teach you how to be more polite, efficient, and rational in asking for help from people who actually know the software or hardware you use. In the vast majority (our estimate is 99%) of cases, those people are not us.

Where should you go to ask questions?

If you're reading this guide right now because you're having a problem with a project and want help, think carefully: do you really think that the authors of this guide just happen to be the maintainers, developers, or technical support for that project? It's quite possible that we have absolutely no idea what the problem you're having is about. If you come to us with a question even after reading this guide, you're probably one of those people we were talking about earlier - we don't really want to talk to you.

We won't answer your questions. We'll ignore them. What we want you to take away from this guide is the ability to ask for real, effective help, rather than mistakenly thinking of us as the "all-purpose customer service" contact.

Please ask questions in the project's own Issue area, forums, mailing lists, chat rooms, user groups, or commercial support channels. That's where you'll find people who are familiar with the specific software, hardware, environment, and historical context.

final reminder

Remember:** Respecting someone's time is the first step in getting the help you can get. **