Using the Help Center

Overview

Have a question for our team? Submit a support ticket here: https://vault-webservices.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/requests/new

Reach out directly to the Internet Archive's Web Archiving & Data Services team if you have questions or requests related to your Vault account that cannot be answered by our support documentation.

Using our support system, you can submit a ticket and receive a response generally within four (4) business days for all non-urgent issues. This page explains how to create and best manage your Vault support tickets.

Note: If you send an email directly to a member of our team, and your question requires further investigation or we aren't able to get back to you right away, we may create a ticket for you in our system.

On this page:

• Finding information in the Help Center
• Participating in the Community
• How to create a support ticket
• Receiving responses and updating your tickets via email
• Updating tickets through the support website
• Review and share support tickets across your team
• Editing your Help Center profile

Finding information in the Help Center

Search will yield results from both the knowledge base and the community at the same time. You can filter for Help Center articles written by Internet Archive staff under the tab "Articles" and for contributions from forum participants under the tab "Community."

Participating in the Community

We encourage all partners to participate in the community by making a post or a comment to ask questions, provide answers, or share ideas and resources here: https://vault-webservices.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/topics. 

You can vote on others' contributions. You can view all your own contributions in one place. You can also track issues by following discussion topics or specific questions. You'll be notified by email when somebody creates a post or adds a response.

To Make a Community Post

1. Click New post in the top-right side of any community page.
2. Enter a Title and Details, which might be anything, including a question, feature request, or tip.
3. Select a Topic for the post from the drop-down menu, if you want to change the selected topic.
4. Click Submit.

To view all your contributions to the community

1. Click your profile icon on the upper-right side of any page, and then click Activities.
2. Click Contributions.
3. Click any link to go to your contribution.

To follow a discussion topic or post

1. Click the topic or post.
2. Click the Follow button below the topic title or question.

To manage the community items you're following

1. Click your profile icon on the upper-right side of any page, and then click Activities.
2. Click Following.
3. Make any desired changes to the community items you're following.

Creating a support ticket

Via the Help Center

Support tickets are a way to directly contact the Web Archiving & Data Services support team. We respond to tickets within four business days, or sooner if possible, however more complex issues may take some time for our engineers to resolve. When working in the Vault web application, you can access our support ticket system by clicking on the Help Center link at the top of every page: 

The Help Center link will direct you to the front page for all of our help documentation and resources, which always includes a quick link to this page and our support ticket system.

Whenever you cannot find the answer to your question in our support documentation or FAQs, follow the link above directly into our support ticket system where you can Submit a request:

The request form page will open and prompt you to include details pertinent to your support ticket, including the following information:

Field Name	Data to Enter	Required?
Subject	A sentence or phrase describing the issue.	Yes
Collection name	Please provide us with the relevant collection name(s).	No
Report ID	Please provide us with the relevant report ID(s).	No
Description	A detailed description of the issue. The description should include the type of web browser you are using and the operating system you are running. Any steps necessary to reproduce errors or problems with the web application should also be listed.	Yes
Attachments	Attach any file(s) relevant to the ticket. For instance, screenshots showing error messages or other behaviours can be very useful to us. Including a screenshot helps ensure your ticket gets processed quickly!	No

Complete your ticket by clicking the Submit button, and that's it – your ticket has been entered into our system! An email verifying that your ticket has indeed been sent to us will be sent to your email address.

Via the Support widget

After clicking the Support button in the bottom right corner, and searching a word or phrase, a 'Contact Us' button will appear:

Select Contact us to fill out the form and click save to submit a ticket:

Receiving responses and updating your tickets via email

When the Web Archiving & Data Services support team replies (adds any comments) to any of your tickets, the reply will be sent to you directly via email. From that point on, you can simply reply to this email and your ticket will be updated with a new comment. As soon as you do, we will receive a notification that you have responded via email and will start processing the new information.

Updating tickets through the support website

If you prefer it to email, you may also update your ticket with additional information directly via the Vault support website, the same place where all new tickets begin.

To do so, check the initial email that was sent to you when you created your ticket. Within that email, click on the help ticket number link circled below:

If you are not already logged into your Vault account, you will be prompted to enter your Vault account login information. Once you've logged in, you will see the details of the specific ticket whose number you clicked on in your email. Enter a comment at the bottom of the page and click Submit to update it.

You can also access all your tickets by logging into the Help Center at https://vault-webservices.zendesk.com/, clicking on your user icon, and selecting Activities from the drop-down menu.

Once logged in, you may view your list of tickets and click on any one that you wish to edit. Once the ticket details display, go to the bottom of the page and enter a new comment. Click Submit and your comment will be posted:

 

Our team will immediately receive a notification that you have entered a new comment. You will also receive an email verifying that your comment has been submitted.

Review and share support tickets across your team

Our support system's website features additional functionality for teams working together with the web application at a single institution. If you would like us to enable the ability for all of the users associated with your account to view each others support tickets, please ask us in the form of a brand new ticket!

Editing your Help Center profile

Interested in changing how your name appears in the Help Center, or creating an avatar?

1. Click your profile icon on the upper-right side of any page and select My profile to display your profile information.
2. Click on the Edit profile button to open a dialog box.
3. After making your desired changes, click the Close button to save them.