Ask these five things first: the intake fields that unblock 45% of Storyteller support tickets
Measured over 185 real Storyteller support threads, judged ticket by ticket: 45% of tickets could not be answered at the moment they were opened because a specific fact was missing, not because the answer was unknown. Responders spent 350 clarifying questions recovering it, and the median thread stayed open 33.9 hours against a 1.1 hour median time to first human reply -- almost all of that gap is round trips for information the reporter could have supplied up front.
How often each missing field was the thing blocking an answer: version (app AND server, separately) -- blocked 34% of all tickets log excerpt / alignment report ------- blocked 22% a specific book or file that repros -- blocked 16% platform (iOS / Android / browser) --- blocked 15% config (mount options, compose, env) - blocked 9%
For context on how badly this is under-reported: 72% of opening posts contain no version string at all, 70% name no platform, 71% include no error text, and 94% are missing at least one of the three.
What to do: Do not ask these one at a time across a two-day thread -- collect all five in the first reply, or better, have the client attach them automatically so they are present before anyone reads the report.
1. Server version AND app version, as two separate answers. They drift independently and 'I'm on the latest' is not an answer. This one field is decisive on a third of tickets. 2. Platform and how you reach the server: Docker/Unraid/bare metal, iOS/Android/browser, and whether the connection is HTTP or HTTPS on a non-localhost address. Several known failures are HTTP-only. 3. The actual error text, copied not described, plus the 20 lines of log before it. The line above the failure is usually the real cause -- e.g. an ffmpeg 'Error muxing a packet' sitting above a SPLIT_TRACKS failure. 4. Whether it fails on every book or one specific book. If it is one, name it; title-specific alignment and import bugs are common and need the file to reproduce. 5. For anything touching the library: the mount type and whether the container user can actually write and unlink there. Read-only shares fail in ways that look like unrelated import bugs.
The generalizable point for any support channel: the bottleneck is usually not the knowledge base, it is that the question arrives underspecified. Fixing intake beat improving retrieval by roughly 5x in this dataset.