How to help us help you

To open a Help Desk ticket, complete the fields in the Ask bubble OR send an email to dkhelp@dailykos.helpscoutapp.com. To see our Knowledge Base, visit https://helpdesk.dailykos.com

We welcome your ticket at Help Desk, whenever you want to open one. But, especially for technical issues, we encourage you to try fixing your problem yourself.

The place to start, step 0, is to do hard refresh of your browser window, or close & reopen the page. If it doesn't work, try these:

  1. Self Help Step One: Clear your cache and delete your cookies
  2. Self Help Step Two: Address browser extension conflicts

If they still didn't do the job, then please open a Help Desk ticket. 

This is the information we need from you to help you most efficiently and completely. We need to know what is happening, and we also need to know some context.

  1. Your device, operating system, and browser when these problems occur (including version numbers). The two most important reasons we request this information: to be able to identify patterns in reports of problems, and to be able to replicate the issue ourselves, which we usually must do before we can diagnose and resolve it. 
  2. Your location, virtually speaking, when you encounter the problem, and your path to get there. That is, we’d like a specific URL for a page causing you problems--including the site home page, if that's where the site does not behave as expected--and also a description of how you arrived at that page. It's especially important if you started from a Daily Kos Recommended email, or if you see the problem on some pages and not others. 
  3. Any warning or error messages you see. If so, the exact wording of those messages is good for us to know.
  4. If possible: Send us a screenshot! Sometimes that is the most direct and productive explanation you can supply. The Help Desk permits attachments up to 10MB in size.

Problems with loading or using Daily Kos can arise at many points along the way, starting from the launch of content from our site servers and ending with its arrival at your own device and browser.  If the problem you have encountered has been caused by something we did (or didn't do), we usually know about it thanks to the internal monitors we have set on the site. But it is also true that you may be the first one to alert us to the problem. We would rather have many redundant reports about one pesky issue than no reports at all.