Best/ preferred/ fastest way to get support?

[jdaviescoates]

I'm wondering when and where is the best place to seek support in various circumstances...

I recently noticed this on the pricing page:

Which would seem to imply that Email Support is treated with higher priority than Forum Support. Is that correct?

I guess that since you've started to use FreeScout this is probably the easiest channel for you to manage, so that would kinda make sense.

But at the same time, asking for support via email doesn't have the same benefit of everyone being able to respond, and then to see the answers too.

I also note that under Support on cloudron.io it gives the info@cloudron.io email address, whereas here on the forum (and within the Support menu within Cloudron itself, where it is also possible to fill in a form to create a support ticket) support@cloudron.io is given (and I assuming if one fills out the support ticket form in effect it just generates an email to support@cloudron.io too, right?).

Then of course there is also https://chat.cloudron.io/ and the chat on there too (and I remember seeing @girish say somewhere that they've added chat here to try to reduce amount of support requests via https://chat.cloudron.io in an attempt to have fewer channels, to make everything more manageable).

And it's also possible to login to https://git.cloudron.io/ and add issues there too.

So I guess my questions are:

1. Where would you @girish @nebulon ideally prefer to receive support requests? (Support tickets from with my.example.com/#/support ? )
2. Where is the best place to ask support if an urgent response is required? (Email? Support tickets from with my.example.com/#/support ?)
   (obviously the problem here is that everyone - myself included - always thinks their little issue is urgent, even if it really isn't)
3. Where is the best place to ask for non-urgent support? (Forum?)
4. When to use https://chat.cloudron.io ? (I guess just when it's stuff like networking issues and synchronous troubleshooting is needed?)
5. When to use https://git.cloudron.io/ ? (I'd likely use this more if I didn't find the 2FA a bit cumbersome).

Basically I want to help you to help us

(Obviously if I have a support request that I deem really urgent I'm likely to just post on the forum, email info@ & support@, use gitlab, and contact on both chats too! - and maybe even dig out some personal email addresses! )

[girish]

Great question!

I would say:

• chat.cloudron.io - this is not to be used for support. When we were smaller, we used this to network with our initial customers. But with our current size, it's not manageable. People bombard us with questions on chat and expect immediate answers (I don't blame them, I blame the tool). This was also stressing us out since we don't like to see questions unanswered So, for all practical purposes, this is our internal tool.

• git.cloudron.io - this is not to be used for support. Our issue tracker is meant to help us in development. GitLab is really our internal tool to track bugs and milestones. It's public because why not, it shows transparency. As a user, one can use those issues to track progress and also see other issues etc. We discourage people from creating bug reports directly in git. Thankfully, not many people do this anyway right now since account creation and 2FA discourages them

• forum.cloudron.io - This is the right place for all support, feature requests and discussions. Please use this as much as possible.

• support@cloudron.io - This is the right place for all support related things. I think some people are just more comfortable writing in private than in public forum and also maybe their setup and usage is sensitive/confidential.

• info@cloudron.io - for general information about our product. this is mostly pre-sales and not support related.

As for priority, the source of the tickets (forum or email) does not matter. premium+ customers have high priority. When we have no premium+ tickets, we treat email and forum requests equally. I think we might even treat forum with higher priority than email since we want to show that we respond with diligence and quickly

Hope that clarifies!

[d19dotca]

@girish I like the clarification. Much appreciated. I shared the same questions so was happy to see this.

My only feedback though knowing how it all works now for support systems... in the pricing page, "Email" is sort of promoted as a bonus, implying it'd be treated quicker than forum posts and such, only surpassed by the Premium Plus customers, but in this case it seems it's not any more helpful and in fact may be the last priority support channel checked, so it isn't really a "bonus" to be a Premium customer for those who are paying for better support channels available to them.

Or put another way... The way it's written now on the Pricing page implies email is better/quicker than forum, but that doesn't appear to actually be the way it is and so that page should probably be re-worked a bit.

Hopefully that's understandable but let me know if I can clarify my point at all.

[girish]

We will fix the pricing page, I agree it's a bit misleading.