Guidelines and Procedures for User Help Volunteers

Each User Help volunteer must subscribe to these two lists:

userhelp and help-answers.

Procedures for answering userhelp mail

All mail received by userhelp should be acknowledged within 2 days. This shows the user that the User Help Team cares about their question. It also allows enough time to answer difficult questions.

The following guidelines will make it easier for us to work as a unified team.

• Read the entire message and check for followups before composing your reply.
• Respond using the correct headers
• All replies are to be polite and professional.
• Followups to other answers should be politely phrased and reflect respect for the other volunteer who answered.
• Whenever possible, direct users to the help documents on CCN. This helps new users to navigate around CCN on their own.
• If an answer cannot be found, redirect them elsewhere for better solutions to their problems, such as ccn.help-exchange, or a newsgroup more directly related to their problem.
• Conclude your message by encouraging that follow up questions be sent to the team.

Putting these guidelines into practice will benefit

• The user who asks the question
• The Userhelp Team as a whole
• Chebucto Community Net