A place to look things up
The help centre is open: written answers to the questions people actually send us.
Until this week, someone stuck in Cordice had one option: ask us. That works while the answer is a message away and stops working the moment two people ask the same thing on a Sunday.
So there is now a help centre. Seven articles to start with, across two shelves — your account and servers — covering the things that come up most: changing a password, turning on two-step verification, ending a session on a device you do not recognise, deleting an account, starting a server, inviting people to it, and working out what roles actually do.
A few decisions in it are worth saying out loud, because they are the ones we would want to know about somebody else’s help pages.
Every step was checked against the app, not remembered. The menu names in the articles — My Account, Login & Security, Two-Factor Authentication — are the ones on your screen, because they were read off the client while the articles were written. Where the platforms differ, the articles say so rather than picking whichever was convenient: the Android app has no reset screen of its own and sends you to the browser, and it cannot yet delete an account at all. Writing that down is less flattering than leaving it out, and considerably more use at the moment you need it.
Search reads the articles, not just their titles. Type “account delete” and you get “Deleting your account”, which is a different string entirely. Each article also carries the words people type that it never says itself, so “2FA” finds the page about two-step verification.
A category with nothing in it does not appear. We have planned shelves for using Cordice day to day, safety, and troubleshooting. You will not see them until there is something on them. A heading that leads nowhere is worse than a shorter list, and it is how help centres come to feel abandoned.
Nothing is dated by when we wrote it. Each article carries the date the answer was last true, which is the only date worth showing, and each says how long it will take to read before you commit to it.
Every page ends with the ways to reach us, in the order that suits the question rather than the order that suits us: email for anything about your own account, the issue tracker for something broken, discussions for a question whose answer other people will want later.
More articles are coming — notifications, voice, and what to do when something will not connect. If you go looking for an answer and it is not there, that is worth telling us: the gaps we hear about are the ones that get filled first.