[Mashiro]

@tryp4vps

Thanks for your reply, bud. That's actually something that could work, in one or another way, much better than sticky guideline threads or information boxes above the threads.

Of course it is much harder to implement compared to a thread or information box.


@deanhills

The topic you linked was one of these topics where we previously tried to make clear how to properly request support for the provided service / VPS. There was also a different one which however got removed later. It was actually a bigger and well written topic (much more detailed) but I don't even remember what the reason for removal was. I wasn't active as staff when it was removed.

The most important things - quick at hand (imho):
- Which VPS from here the user has (I know about the profile thing but it seems sometimes people don't update it or it is out of date? When I ask them they tell me a different VPS than their profile says.)
- The used OS and its architecture
- What exactly was done before the error/issue occured (by that I don't mean things such as "I installed package xyz" - that's not enough information. A bit more detail.)
- Screenshots or a different copy of the error message(s)
- What steps have been already taken to solve the issues (possibly here also provide links to solutions you already tried to help us avoid reposting the very same not working solutions).

No one liners saying "this or that doesn't work" or similar stuff.


Optionally (probably asked too much) it would be great if people would post links to guides they followed when they ran into the issues they report. Often I experience that people used guides to set things up... and these guides are actually a great help to retrace what has been done on the system and what could have gone wrong. They help to reproduce the issue. That's optional though because not everyone uses guides for every case probably.

Who knows but actually I might be asking for too much already. In real life experience always shows that support tickets are pain to deal with. However here we can at least expect that we all are the same group of users "VPS administrators and operaters" and not two really different separate groups (e.g. normal end user vs IT system administrator). We might be on different levels with our knowledge but we're still dealing with the same tasks and material.


People simply should be more detailed. That's all I'm trying to say. For example the last case I helped with was a good example. Link here.

phpMyAdmin was installed via a package manager and removed incorrectly. The attempt to reinstall it via the package manager failed therefore. Previous personal experience taught me that doing something manually such as removing things on things installed through packager managers can mess things up really bad. Fortunately OP was very cooperative and we could resolve all issues within less than 2 hours.