Median reply under a day
Write to the admins
The fastest way to reach the market is a PGP-encrypted ticket. No forms to fill, no email to guess, no support queue to sit in. This page covers what to include, what to avoid, and what to expect on the way back.
On this page
How to write one
A ticket is a message, encrypted with the market's public key, sent to the address the market publishes for support. You do not need an account to open one, though if you have one, mentioning it helps. The message is signed with your own key if you have one, which tells the reader it came from you and not from someone who found your address. The whole exchange is asynchronous, you send it, the team reads it when they get to it, and they reply to the address your message came from. There is no live chat, and there is no phone, and the slowness of the channel is the point, because it is the channel that keeps the exchange private.
What to include
The details that speed a reply up are the specific ones. If it is about an order, the order number, the vendor, and what happened, in that order, with the dates. If it is about a mirror, the address you tried and what you saw when you tried it. If it is about your account, the username and, only if you are sure you need to, the seed, encrypted and sent separately from the rest of the message. The more of the specific detail you include, the less the reply has to ask, and the fewer the round trips, and the round trips are where the time goes. A ticket that answers its own follow-up questions in advance is the one that gets a fast answer, because the reader does not have to come back to you to get the next piece.
What to avoid
The things that slow a reply down are the ones that make the reader work for the answer. A long narrative with the important fact buried in the middle, a question that is really three questions in one, a seed phrase sent in the clear inside the same message as everything else, a ticket that repeats a previous one without saying so. None of these is fatal, and all of them add a round trip, and the round trip is the cost. Write it the way you would want it written to you, which is specific, short, and in the order the reader will need it, and the reply will come back the same way, which is the whole point of the format.
What to expect
The median time from a ticket to a reply is under a day, and the replies are specific, which is the difference between an administration that is reading your message and one that is generating a response to it. The tone is plain, because the people on the other end have been doing this long enough to know that the plain answer is the one that gets acted on, and the fancy one is the one that gets misread. If your question is one the guides already answer, the reply will say so and point you there, which is not a brush-off, it is the team saving you the time it would take to explain something that is already explained. And if the answer is "not yet" or "not for everyone," the reply will say that too, because the honest no is worth more than the polite maybe, and the market has built its reputation on the no being honest.