Provide technical support for your users

You are free to have your users request help on the QIIME 2 Forum for your QIIME 2-based tools. This will generally take place under the Community Plugin Support category. We encourage this as it helps to centralize knowledge around the QIIME 2 ecosystem, but you are of course also free to direct users to your email, GitHub issue tracker, or another resource for technical support.

Note

Within the next few months (as of 16 August 2024) we plan to begin offer sub-categories under the Community Plugin Support category where plugin developers can run their own mini-forum focused around their plugin. We are developing eligibility criteria that will likely be focused around developer-responsiveness, automated plugin testing benchmarks, and existence of tested plugin documentation. More on this soon.

If you choose to support your users through the QIIME 2 Forum you should monitor the forum to answer questions from your users. You can search the Discourse community forum for information on configuring your notifications - there are lots of options for this.

Please be aware that the QIIME 2 Forum Moderators will not be able to provide support for your plugins, since they won’t necessarily be experts in your tools (and are already tied up providing tech support to the community). If we see questions come in related to your tools the moderators will try to reach you if you seem to have not noticed, but please do monitor for activity related to your tools.

We provide and maintain the platform for supporting users, but it’s still ultimately your responsibility to provide user support.