How to get help.

Home > All Categories > Troubleshoot > How to get help.

How to get help.

Why You Should Read This

The PerfectShare engineers and support team likes happy customers. Like you, we want to keep your experience with our service positive. If you need help or if you think you have found a bug, we would love to hear from you. The more effectively you communicate your question or issue; the more likely that can help you or an engineer will actually fix any bugger you may have found.

By following these guidelines, you can help ensure that your issue stays at the top of our engineers' heap, and get fixed. Email is the preferred method of requesting help or submitting a bug.

How to Write a Useful Bug Report

Useful bug reports are ones that get bugs fixed. A useful bug report normally has two qualities:

1- Reproducible. If an engineer can't see it or conclusively prove that it exists, the engineer will probably stamp it WORKS-FOR-ME or INVALID, and move on to the next bug. Every relevant detail you can provide helps.

2- It is Specific. The quicker the engineer can isolate the issue to a specific problem, the more likely it'll be expediently fixed. If you're crashing in a specific function, please take the time to isolate what on the page is triggering the unexpected behavior. A screen shot is a great help. Even a snippet of an error message is a great help.

Specific bugs have the added bonus of remaining relevant when an engineer actually gets to them; in a rapidly changing application like ours, a bug report of "clicking X crashes my browser" becomes meaningless after the site experiences a half-dozen redesigns.

Let's say you click on a user name to edit that users email address. You click. The Edit User dialog opens up, you change the email address, yet when you click Save....nothing happens. The browser just sits there and want to write up a bug report:

BAD: "Something is wrong on the User page. I was editing a user and it didn't work. I think that this is a really bad problem and you should fix it or else nobody will use your service. By the way, my sister thinks your icons really suck."

GOOD: "I am (username) from (sitename) and I wanted to edit the email address of John Doe. The edit user dialog opened, I changed the email address from johndoe@xyzcorp.com to jdoe@xyzcorp. I clicked the Save button but, the dialog just stalled. It would not save the new email address. I was using Microsoft Internet Explorer 6. Attached is a screen dump of the window after the stall. However, I tried it again using Firefox and it worked just fine."

The idea is to give us as much information ass possible so that we can reproduce the problem and, get a head start on fixing your issue.

Authored by: mroberts This question has been viewed 849 times so far.

Click Here to View all the questions in Troubleshoot category.

File Attachments