missing good links for support

[Jane Silber]

The text in the "get free community support" box on http://www.ubuntu.com/support talks about IRC, which is the resource with probably the highest barrier to entry and neglects to mention Ask and the Forums, which arguably will be more accessible to many people. That text should be amended to first have a sentence with Ask/Forums link (e.g., see/reuse http://community.ubuntu.com/help-information/)

[Alejandro J. Cura (alecu)]

An option to lower quite a bit the barrier to entry to IRC would be embedding a web irc client right into that community support page.

Since doing so in the Python Argentina community, we had a lot more people visiting the channel and getting almost immediate answers (which I think is the only redeeming point of IRC): http://python.org.ar/IRC

[Peter Mahnke (peterm-ubuntu)]

On our list is a project to clean this up a bit more, but for now I am updating as you suggest... to the follow (with links):

Get free community support

Ask Ubuntu and Ubuntu Forums are great sources of answers to common questions about installing, troubleshooting and optimizing Ubuntu. And if you want to speak with the Ubuntu Community directly, try one of these IRC channels.