Over the last year in particular, Ask Ubuntu has made a great deal of advancements regarding its standing in the wider Ubuntu community. The prominent integration in the new Canonical topbar, as well as help texts and install slides telling users about Ask Ubuntu gives us the unique position of being the source of information for people with problems with Ubuntu.

This, however, causes some unexpected issues: A lot of the questions asked nowadays are purely tech support questions - people dump a crash log or error message on us, give us little information about what they are even trying to do, and then expect us to find a solution for them. Mostly, these users don't stay or come back either, and just want their "question" answered. This, of course, hurts the site: We get a lot of low quality questions, and due to some of our shortcomings with closures, these questions stick around despite being utterly useless for us.

We need to get rid of this tech support impression. We're not tech support. We're here to help solve problems on a working Ubuntu, not fix a broken one. We're here to answer questions about how to use Ubuntu, not how to debug it.

Tech support inherently requires an awful lot of data, and an awful lot of interaction with other people. This does not mix well with the Stack Exchange format. We cannot have a handful of requests for more information in the comments section of every other question, and we cannot wait for these to be added at the asker's leisure and leave the question to rot in the depths of Unanswered in the meantime.

For tech support related to bugs, people are far better off on launchpad, and troubleshooting may be better served in a dedicated chat, on an Ubuntu IRC or even the Ubuntu Forums.

Over the last year in particular, Ask Ubuntu has made a great deal of advancements regarding its standing in the wider Ubuntu community. The prominent integration in the new Canonical topbar, as well as help texts and install slides telling users about Ask Ubuntu gives us the unique position of being the source of information for people with problems with Ubuntu.

This, however, causes some unexpected issues: A lot of the questions asked nowadays are purely tech support questions - people dump a crash log or error message on us, give us little information about what they are even trying to do, and then expect us to find a solution for them. Mostly, these users don't stay or come back either, and just want their "question" answered. This, of course, hurts the site: We get a lot of low quality questions, and due to some of our shortcomings with closures, these questions stick around despite being utterly useless for us.

We need to get rid of this tech support impression. We're not tech support. We're here to help solve problems on a working Ubuntu, not fix a broken one. We're here to answer questions about how to use Ubuntu, not how to debug it.

Tech support inherently requires an awful lot of data, and an awful lot of interaction with other people. This does not mix well with the Stack Exchange format. We cannot have a handful of requests for more information in the comments section of every other question, and we cannot wait for these to be added at the asker's leisure and leave the question to rot in the depths of Unanswered in the meantime.

For tech support related to bugs, people are far better off on launchpad, and troubleshooting may be better served in a dedicated chat, on an Ubuntu IRC or even the Ubuntu Forums.