How to use Portainer's GitHub Discussions

[jamescarppe]

Welcome to the new official GitHub Discussions forum for Portainer! We've migrated over from using GitHub Issues for everything to splitting out into a more structured separation of help, ideas / feature requests and bug reports in order to make sure we're getting the information we need in all cases to help you with what you're looking for.

For the Discussions, you'll note there are a few different categories to choose from. By default when visiting the discussions page, posts from all categories will be shown. If you want to filter by category, you can click the category name on the left of the listing page. For our needs, we've gone with:

• Announcements: Where the Portainer team will post important news and updates (like this post!)
• Help: Where users like you can ask for help with Portainer - everything including installation, usage and troubleshooting.
• Ideas: Where an idea for a new feature (or update to an existing feature) can be raised, and where you can contribute your feedback to existing ideas.
• Polls: Where the Portainer team will create polls when we're looking for feedback on a specific topic.

Bug reports remain in GitHub Issues as it is the best suited forum for more detailed problem reports.

Asking for help

The best place to start when looking for help is in our documentation and knowledge base. It may be that your question is already answered there. Failing that, your next stop should be the Help discussions. Make sure you search the discussions (use the search box above) to see if anyone has asked a similar question before. Be sure to also check closed discussions when searching as well. If you can't find an existing question and answer that matches yours, you can open a new thread by clicking New discussion.

When asking a question, please provide as much context as you can. The more we understand, the easier it will be for us and other community members to help. We also recommend that if your question relates to the functionality of Portainer, that you ensure you're on the latest version of Portainer first. We aren't able to offer support for older versions of Portainer. You can find the list of releases in our documentation along with the supported platforms for each release.

When someone has provided an answer to your question, please mark it as Answered so that if someone else finds your thread in the future, they will quickly be able to locate the answer. You can do this by clicking Mark as answer in the reply that answers the question.

We also highly recommend helping out our other community users as well! If you see a question you know the answer to, please feel free to post a reply in the thread. The more community users we have helping each other, the quicker that those problems will be solved.

Suggesting an idea

When suggesting an idea for Portainer, first make sure the idea hasn't already been posted. Search the Ideas category for any threads that might relate to what you're after. If someone has already posted an idea that matches yours, you can add your support by upvoting the idea (the up arrow in the main post). The more upvotes an idea has, the more likely we are to consider it for implementation. You can also reply to the thread with additional information as to why the idea would be useful to you and what problems it might solve for you, as additional context from our users is extremely helpful when formulating features and changes.

If your idea hasn't already been suggested, you can post it by clicking New discussion. Fill out the fields with as much detail as you can.

Reporting a bug

If you've encountered a bug with Portainer, we first recommend you make sure you're on the latest version of Portainer. It may be that your bug has been fixed already! You can find the list of releases in our documentation along with the supported platforms for each release. If the bug still exists after updating, then we recommend searching GitHub issues to see if someone else has already reported the issue. If they have, you can reply to the existing issue with any further detail on the issue you can provide - every little bit helps us identify the root cause and potential solution. Make sure you also search closed bugs.

If you can't find an existing bug that matches your experience, you can open a new bug report. Please be as thorough as you can when filling out the form - we know there's a lot there, but in particular with bugs the more detail we have on your particular configuration and how to reproduce the bug, the easier it will be for us to confirm the issue and to find a fix.

We may need to ask you additional questions about your bug report. Be sure to check in on it in case we need more detail from you to move forward.

How we prioritize support

At Portainer we are still a small team, and as such we need to prioritize where and how we provide support. We prioritize as follows:

1. Business Edition customers with a support agreement (Professional and Enterprise) – supported via our ticketing system and get first priority.
2. Business Edition Opportunities – Businesses who are actively evaluating Portainer BE for purchase can receive personal support - log tickets via the form on our support page.
3. Starter, Starter Plus, Home & Student Business Edition license users - supported via this GitHub Discussions forum either by the community, or by our technical people when they have time.
4. 3/5 Node Free Business Edition Users - supported via this GitHub Discussions forum either by the community, or by our technical people when they have time.
5. Community Edition users – because this is open source software we would really appreciate it if the Community can jump in and help with support for these users as much as possible. If you think you can help, please respond.