Are end-user support questions on-topic?

Question

Are questions of the form "Tor doesn't work for me; please help me trouble-shoot" on-topic here?

I see lots of these questions. It's not clear to me whether it's useful to take these kinds of questions, if they amount to product support (helping people debug their installation of Tor or diagnose why it crashes / doesn't work on their particular machine). I wonder whether these questions are likely to be a one-off, where an answer will help only the particular user who asked it but never be useful to anyone again (either because the situation is too specific to that one person, or because it's too hard for anyone else to find it by search). I could see the site going either way on this.

(Note that I'm asking about questions from users of Tor, not developers.)

I checked the help center, but it doesn't say anything about what is on-topic here.

Are these on-topic? If they are, are there any guidelines for posters about how to ask a good question of this form?

Answer 1

I consider those questions on topic, because the site is a "Beta Q&A site for researchers, developers, and users of Tor". So users can ask questions and something like "Tor doesn't work for me" is fine. However some people just ask this question without giving any more useful information. If they don't provide any more information I tend to vote to close them.

Answer 2

I've thought the same in some for or other, and admittedly don't spend much time on "here's my log, what's wrong?" questions myself as that's not my forté.

But as Jens said it's a site for users as well, and as long as they provide some backing info they can be helpful. We do rely on the community to flag duplicates though, because they can be a bit tough to recognise.

I'll take a look at the Help Center and see what I can add to help clarify this.