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Our is a public, B2C community designed to support learners while learning online. It’s not a community for technical support. However, in the past couple weeks, we’ve seen a huge spike in people posting/complaining about technical support issues. 

Despite our community superusers’ best efforts to guide people to the right space for help, we just keep getting tons of new posts and replies about the same issues.

I’ve updated the language on the “create a topic” page (see below) and linked to an article that explains our current situation.

This hasn’t seemed to help. People are not following instructions provided in threads on how to properly get technical support, and instead they are just spamming the community and tagging other community members trying to get their problems solved. :hushed:

I’m trying to communicate the effect of these bugs on our community, an an effort to prioritize fixes. In the meantime, our community members are getting frustrated, and so I am. :sob:

Do you have any relatively quick-to-implement ideas for decreasing the number of people posting about the same exact thing? 

My short-term suggestion:

Create a new category where you move all the technical issue topics to. This will help keeping your other (productive) categories clean. (If you don’t want these topics to be found via search engines, set them to “noindex, follow”.)

Reply to the posts. Tell them you can’t help them and link to the article (“landing page”). Then close the topic for new comments. This will at least guide those who posted the topic into the right direction (and those who found the topic via search → see above). And it will further strengthen the visibility of your “landing page”.

Promote the “landing page” as the hero banner. → You’ve already done that.

Edit the “landing page” and add FAQs to address the most common issues users are posting. → You’ve already done that, I think.

Apart from that:

In the long run this will only get you so far. Consider to internally escalate this huge support demand to ask for community support resources. It is clear that the users demand to get help in the community, maybe because the other support channels have a huge backlog or users simply don’t find the other support channels. So either the existing support channels need to improve their visibility and/or their availability - or your company needs a shift in its support channel strategy due to the changing demands of the users.

@bjoern_schulze, these are great suggestions. Thank you so much for taking the time to share your ideas! 

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