Always write a fresh-from-scratch mail when reporting a new issue. Replying to old issues will reopen these tickets and a) break the organization and thematical coherency of an issue report and b) might lead to the mail to go unnoticed, as it will be placed in an already solved ticket. Such postings require time-consuming manual work on our side to disentangle them.

Replying by changing the subject doesn't help, as the ticketing system recognizes old threads from hidden mail headers, which are preserved when replying. The only situation where you should reply is, when your current issue is clearly still the old one. If you are in doubt rather open a new ticket and mention the old one. Merging tickets is much easier then disentangling unrelated ones .

The email subject is the first thing we see and we use it to quickly classify and prioritize a support ticket. Please keep it as concise and complete as possible. We don't mind long subject lines as long as they contain relevant information.

• Good: “Running software xyz fails with library dependency error”, “Logging in to tbi-worker fails with error 'Connection closed'”, “Please install xyz package for R 3.6 on PBS cluster”
• Bad: “Software xyz doesn't work”, “Can't log in to cluster”, “Please install xyz package for R”
• Extremely bad: “help, urgent!”, “problem”, “software installation”

Please create an individual ticket for each (unrelated) question. Mixing unrelated topics in a single ticket makes ticket management hard and ineffective for the supporters.

When asking for software add-ons like R or Python packages and Perl modules always let us know for which version of the base package you require the add-on and on which platform (SuSE or CentOS) it is required.

If you mention it in the subject (which is good!) still repeat the complete request in the mail body. Email subjects are sometimes changed within the ticketing system to canonicalize them or the make them better searchable. All relevant content should be contained in the mail body.

Help us reproduce your issue (that helps us to test our solution) by telling us exactly what you did (commands, scripts, loaded modules) and where you did it (hostname, which cluster, which cluster node).

Help us to understand your problem by sending commands and resulting error messages or error logs. Unless you are an expert and already know for sure the cause of a problem, then don't try to be smart by trimming error messages or error logs. Not so rarely the helpful statements are exactly in the cut-out part .

Attaching scripts to the ticket is ok, but please don't attach datafiles. If you need to send us datafiles then please provide them in some place in the filesystem (e.g. in analysis). As administrators we can access them almost not matter where they are stored. If you refer to these files in the ticket we will understand this as an approval to access them or to make copies of them for testing purposes. If that isn't the case then please let us know.