Account support

garth
At the moment there doesn't seem to be a way to get account support for Zotero, unless you wish to post your question publicly. Or is the security@zotero.org email address meant for this purpose? (https://www.zotero.org/support/contact_us)

Does this change if you upgrade your storage plan?
  • dstillman
    What kind of support are you looking for?

    All technical support is through these forums. Zotero developers read every post and respond to many of them, as do many long-time community contributors, who in many cases are more knowledgeable about specific issues than the core Zotero staff. Doing all support via the forums allows questions to be answered very quickly and in a way that benefits both the people asking and the rest of the community. If you don't want to post your question under your main username, you can create a separate account for posting.

    Billing questions for storage subscriptions can be addressed via email to storage@zotero.org.
  • garth
    edited February 16, 2016
    Thanks for your quick reply. Sorry for the delay in my reply (I've been having issues with my Zotero email account, so I didn't get a notification of your response.)

    I was interested in two types of support questions:

    a) Those involving personal information, such as email addresses on one's account. I had thought registration@zotero.org was for that, but had been waiting weeks for a reply, which is why I posted this question. I have since received a brusque reply from that email address, although it would still be good to know whether this is the correct email address to use.

    b) I was considering upgrading my storage plan because Webdav was proving to be tricky, but I felt it was too risky without decent support (and with obscure error messages when I tried to change my email address on my account page). The delay in hearing from registration@zotero.org concerned me. In the meantime, I have managed to get the Webdav solution working. (I also tried out Mendeley because they seem to offer good and friendly support for billing etc., although I still found Zotero to be better for my current purposes.)

    I agree that your forums are responsive and helpful, but I think it would be useful and reassuring to make it clearer that you are approachable for these type of questions, especially if billing is involved.
  • adamsmith
    so yes, billing question should get answered pretty promptly (now -- that hasn't always been the case) using the e-mail Dan gives above. For e-mail and related issues, you can start by posting the general issue and error message here and we can start with there -- obviously no need for you to post your e-mail address on the forums.
  • garth
    Thank you for the clarification. My email problem was resolved by registration@zotero.org, so I am fine with this at present.

    Of course it's up to you, but you might want to consider making contact information a bit easier to come by. Unless I'm missing something obvious it takes two clicks at present to find this information (under "Documentation", and a heading called "Small Print"), and this doesn't include information about storage@zotero.org. I realise you want to channel people to the forums - for very good reasons - but it seemed to me (perhaps incorrectly) that you tried to make the contact information hard to discover in order to achieve this.

    I think Zotero is already great, so I am hoping that you will be able to continue improving it as other reference managers develop.
  • adamsmith
    It's not my decision, but I assume that's indeed on purpose, yes. If people start e-mailing the storage e-mail with general tech support, it becomes unmanageable. And if e-mails are easily accessible, people _will_ use them.

    Mendeley just has a lot more people on staff. They can do e-mail support to a degree that Zotero can't (I believe they have two full time staff doing nothing but support).
  • garth
    Fair enough. Zotero has achieved so much with its open source principles and I can understand that getting paying customers is not part of its current vision (i.e. it is non-commercial). Nevertheless, it is good that Mendeley integrates with Zotero for those who need to be able to rely on this type of focus. Hopefully this won't erode the good that Zotero has achieved.
  • adamsmith
    edited February 17, 2016
    paying customers are very much part of Zotero's vision (and it does have enough paying customers to sustain its current operations and development, afaik).
    Getting bought up by a large commercial publisher who will then cross-subsidize its operations (which is how Mendeley can afford what they do) isn't part of Zotero's vision.
  • garth
    All very interesting - thank you for explaining. I look forward to seeing how things develop.
  • dstillman
    I want to reiterate that having people post to the forums isn't just due to limited resources — it's because we can actually provide better, faster, more knowledgeable support this way. Remember that part of Zotero's being open-source means that we have all sorts of contributors who don't work for Zotero. I've personally written much of the code in Zotero and, while I'm the most qualified to answer many questions, and do, I don't have the slightest idea how to answer some of the questions posted (and quickly answered) here, because they pertain to parts of the project that I don't work on — indeed, that no one who gets paid to work on Zotero works on. Paid customer support reps would know even less — you might get a response from them via email, but they wouldn't actually be able to answer a wide variety of questions, which would be a waste of everyone's time. If you ask here, you have the benefit of asking everyone involved with the project.

    Also note that, with the exception of billing questions, whether someone is a paying customer doesn't make any difference in terms of the support they might need. You can get the full Zotero functionality without paying for increased storage, so the questions are the same.
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