[Mashiro]

Hello everyone,

I was reading another support topic on the forum today and again the big question popped up in my mind. I have been asking this question myself several times whenever I have seen so many of the support topics here and on other sites.

Why and how is it that people cannot be bothered to provide some basic but crucial information? Like why don't they bother to provide the used OS? AND WHY do all of them basically ignore support guidelines (where it might even be mentioned to include the OS and other information)? This second question is just a cherry on the cake. At FreeVPS we made some clear support guidelines to be able to provide proper, accurate and fast support. No one absolutely bothered to follow them (excluding people here that actually always opened proper support topics already since day one).

This basic information are very much necessary. They improve how support is given. The quality of provided support and solution does kind of depend on them, too.

Example: If there is some kind of issue with a package installation (e.g. SSH) and no OS information is provided but simply the package manager output. Now the package manager as can be seen there is apt. Without the OS though this information is not really helpful. There are so many OSs using apt as their package manager. And in this very specific example that bases on a real support topic here, the user has been using Ubuntu (information was provided in a later post after it was asked for). So after that, the error message from the package manager + OS has lead to an instant reason for the issue and a solution after only a few minutes of research.

That's the thing I'm talking about. If the user had initially provided the OS already... I wouldn't need to ask for this information and could have already found a (possible) reason and (maybe) the right solution.

There is also other information that can be helpful (depending on the case though). And I had run ins with users... where I asked for this information and the user kept evading my request... Guess what! It took several days and many replies until the issue was solved because they simply couldn't provide the requested information and kept telling me something totally different is the issue. In the end... I end up actually looking into the issue on there server MYSELF and in 99% of the case IT IS EXACTLY as I thought it was.

If people think that I or others do this just as a hobby and with little knowledge... Well, I don't. It's my profession and I know from real life experience and hard work that this crucial information can be a game changer. Honestly I can't stand people who open tickets sometimes and provide little information or open oneliner topics without any information at all. I'm thinkful for all posted error messages though. Stuff like "I can't start <service name> on my server" is NOT HELPFUL!

So I ask myself the big (overall) question: What's wrong with the people?

/rant