Fun stats from Perch Support and how to get help fast

We’ve been running some reports on our official support forum and we thought we’d share our findings along with some suggestions on how to make best use of support.

The “new” Perch Forum is now 6 months old, we thought it would be interesting to find out how many posts come in every day and how quickly posts move from a question being asked to a Solution being marked. Not everyone marks the correct solution as a solution but of those who did:

A lot of the issues that took longer than this were just due to the Percher only working on their project at weekends and so on, or just being busy on other things so taking a while to come back and mark the issue as solved. It is helpful to us and other Perchers if you can flag up which answer fixed your issue. Anyone browsing the forum later with the same problem can see what worked.

The majority of the above issues were solved by Perch support, however there are a growing number of Perchers who pop in and answer questions. Thank you to everyone who does that!

Our busiest day on the forum was the 29th October 2014 with 27 new threads started with 118 replies.

Improve our stats (and get help fast)

Very often we are asked questions in the forum that we can’t help with without asking you for more information. So the more information you can include in your initial post the better. The key thing we would like you to post is your Diagnostic Report. Newer versions of Perch have a short version, this is usually all you need.

If your question is about a template, then post the template code.

Before asking for support check that the version of Perch you are running is up to date. That’s likely to be the first thing we ask you to do as we don’t leave genuine bugs hanging around for long! You may find the problem you are having is already fixed – so update and then check to see if the issue has been solved before posting.

Perch has a Debug Mode. If you are having trouble with perch_content_custom, with displaying the correct blog post, or the right template then switching on Debug might just point out where the issue is. If not posting the debug information with your initial request can help us spot the problem.

If you are getting a “white screen” you have a PHP error. Look in your error log and find the actual error, if it doesn’t help you post that message to the forum when explaining the problem.

Remember that you can use Markdown formatting in the forum. If you are posting a chunk of code start it with three tilde characters ~~~ then finish with the same. It will be formatted neatly and make it much easier for us to read.

We always want to help, and the most frustrating issues for us and you are where we just can’t get enough information to do that quickly. Give us enough information to be able to reproduce the problem you have and we’ll have you back to your site as quickly as possible!