Ooops, you just lost your password and it's the weekend and there's no one at the Help Desk to answer your plea. Wouldn’t it be great to find instructions right away? Now, with our new helpdesk interface you'll get an immediate answer by just typing in "password." Of course there's still the Monday through Friday crew there as back-up to get you through more complicated issues.
For many years, we’ve had a separate helpdesk forum for getting help with Daily Kos. We’ve outgrown the system we’re currently using and are transitioning to a new helpdesk provider which we believe will offer a better experience for both you and the Help Desk staff.
One of the general challenges of integrating helpdesk is that most vendors are thinking about shopping or installed software, and we’re really not either. (If you were hoping the change meant you’d get to do real time chat with a nice person based overseas, I’m afraid you will be disappointed.) We are working with the feature sets on offer and have chosen HelpScout as the best of the options. One of the nice features it offers is that it will let you ask your question without leaving our site, and can suggest what are hopefully useful help articles that will display alongside the site as you try to solve your issue. Ideally, your question may get answered without having to wait for a staff member to respond, so that you can get on with your day. But, if it isn’t, we’ll continue to have staff answering questions during weekday business hours.
The new system is email-based instead of forum-based. This means that all inquiries will now be private, unlike the old system that allowed for some communal discussion of issues. This will be different, better for some cases and worse for others. In addition to (or instead of) checking your email, you can pop out the HelpDesk panel at any time and quickly access your previous conversations from the same session.
The Help Desk link remains at the upper right of the navigation, and is also in the “hamburger” menu on the left. In addition, helpdesk.dailykos.com will continue to be available as a working location that leads into the knowledge base articles in our new digs and also lets you contact the help staff. This system should be available to you even if the main Daily Kos site is not. Status.dailykos.com also remains active if you are looking for news about why we are down and when we expect to solve any issues that come up.
1. You can ask us anything, but some things are beyond our control.
How do I use this exciting new feature?
1. Start here, at the Help Desk link in the upper right, or from the link on the menu in the upper left corner.
It will give you some basic articles to start with. I realize that for most of you reading this, you already know the stuff in these articles, but I’m hoping they’re good choices for people who are new to the system. I’m open to suggestions for articles that might be more helpful.
At the bottom, you can type a question where it will search to try to find something relevant.
2. As you can see, the answer suggestions for this question are less than satisfying. For those of you who have solved it, or the problem of explaining why there won’t be Second Breakfast, please let me know.
2. It will return suggestions. Ideally you’ll click on an article and you’ll know just what to do next, and not need to wait for any more help from us! But, if not, click the “Ask” in the dialog header to continue on.
3. Click the “Email” choice. Yes, it’s a choice of one. I’m sorry.
3. Click the “email” choice as your communication method of choice. I’m afraid HelpScout is incredulous that we don’t have Operators Standing By, but we are not able to support that.
4. Ask your question. You get a subject line and a place to fill in the question.
If you’re not logged in, it will also ask you for a name and an email address. If you are, it will know already your username and email address from your user profile.
4. Your search inquiry was not saved, so you’ll type in from scratch here. You can attach an image with a screenshot or a picture of the offending cat, as required.
If a screen shot is relevant, you can attach it. Screen shots are often extremely helpful for assisting us with troubleshooting, if you can get one easily.
Click “Send a Message.”
5. You are done, for now. To dismiss the dialog, you can do one of three things:
- Click “Help Desk” again
- Click the “Help with Daily Kos” bubble below the dialog, that sort of blends in with the advertisements
- Reload the page
6. To look for replies, check your email. If it didn’t ask you for an email address, your message will go to the email account that’s on your profile. If your email address isn’t the one on your profile, you may still be able to access the conversation using the same browser you created it with, if you haven’t cleared out your browser data.
Ideally: ensure your user profile email address is an account you can actually check. We don’t share that email and we don’t use it for anything but system messages. In particular, never forget that your email address is a key for retrieving your account. This means that without the email, you might not be able to retrieve it, and if you used a throwaway insecure address site, someone else might be able to, if they guess it.
5. How to dismiss the dialog
The first days with this new system will be an adjustment for everyone, both community and staff, so your patience will be appreciated. We think the new workflow will be a significant improvement for you and give us more flexibility going forward.
As always, we appreciate your feedback in comments.