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Help other users

Last modified: September 26, 2009 - 23:19

Want to help others out? Fabulous! Even the most gifted Drupal veterans were once new to Drupal. Chances are, there are people who have helped them one way or the other. Whatever your skill level, you can give back to the Drupal community by sharing what you know with other users who need support. User support relies on contributions from kindhearted people like you, so anything you can share is very much appreciated!

Places to offer support:

  • The Support Forums are a great place to start, and is where most user support takes place. You can keep tabs on the latest posts by clicking the recent posts link in the navigation bar.
  • Find like-minds in Groups.Drupal.org- Search the directory and join a group of people in your local or regional area, or a group of others using your favorite theme or module, or working in your field (e.g., education, e-commerce, etc)
  • There is a Support Mailing List. Feel free to subscribe and help out!
  • View a list of active support requests in the bug tracker.
  • If you prefer real-time chat, #drupal-support on irc.freenode.net is the place to be. The Drupal community is very active on IRC. Learn to use Drupal's IRC channels.
  • See also the list of language-specific communities if you want to help out in giving support in other languages.

User Support Advice:

  • Patience is a virtue. Remember that Drupal has a challenging learning curve associated with it, and sometimes people need some hand-holding. If you're an impatient person, you might want to consider helping out in other areas instead.
  • Tell people how you found the answers. If there's a handbook page that was relevant to the question asked, feel free to refer people to it. If there's not yet a handbook page, consider contributing one to documentation.
  • Be positive and thorough. If you are dealing with a new user your response will be their first impression of the community, and it will affect their own behavior in the future.
  • You will likely run into users who are simply exasperated and frustrated and may use emotional language. Avoid expressing an emotional reaction. Remain positive! If they offer actual examples/issues/problems, focus on those practical things to work towards a solution. If they are only emotionally venting, it would be best to ignore it.
  • People are writing in English as a second language, or they may be young, or they may be inexperienced with typing and they can come off terse or rude. It's best to assume good faith, that people are asking for help, and want to avoid conflict.
  • Employ diminishing replies in heated situations. This can cool things off by ensuring your response is always shorter than that you're responding to.

Tips:

  • Use links to commonly used references and resources to save yourself time typing the same answers over and over. This also reinforces the use of the Handbook.
  • Copy and paste common responses you find yourself repeating into a text file for copying and pasting into forum responses.
  • Select your favorite links and add them as 'bookmarks' in your browser's sidebar for easy access.

Here are some examples of common situations and suggested links:

Provide examples
Examples are useful. We have Web sites. When we have a Web site that uses a specific feature, we can use the site as a live example of something that works, explaining how we implemented the feature. Examples are not so useful if they contain complicated mixtures of modules and features that bury the one you are trying to explain.

People will read your comments long after you write the comments. If you provide an example in a forum post then change the example site so that the site is no longer an example, please update your comments to reflect the change.

http://drupal.org/node/325051 is an example of an example based on drupal.org, guaranteeing the poster can view the example.

Remember to use example.com as the domain name for theoretical examples. example.com is a domain name reserved for use in examples. http://example.com/ goes nowhere. You do not create wasteful network traffic when people select http://example.com/.

Further Reading

Foster thinking. Even if it's not a question you see go by fifty times a day... don't answer it with a direct fix (unless the person is a known non-vamp, or it's a real puzzler). Answer with questions to spur (and guide) thought. If the Help Vampire resists thinking or complains, give them the URL for the Resources page and withhold further assistance.

Reward self-help and helping others. Thank people who ask intelligent questions and do research first, and people who make an effort to help others. Tell them they're a credit to the community. Be especially generous with praise and emoticons for those who are actively reforming their ways. Help is a trickle-down economy.

-- from Help Vampires: A Spotter's Guide by Amy Hoy.

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