B.5 Support requests

If you're trying to make PuTTY do something for you and it isn't working, but you're not sure whether it's a bug or not, then please consider looking for help somewhere else. This is one of the most common types of mail the PuTTY team receives, and we simply don't have time to answer all the questions. Questions of this type include:

• If you want to do something with PuTTY but have no idea where to start, and reading the manual hasn't helped, try posting to a newsgroup (see section B.1.2) and see if someone can explain it to you.
• If you have tried to do something with PuTTY but it hasn't worked, and you aren't sure whether it's a bug in PuTTY or a bug in your SSH server or simply that you're not doing it right, then try posting to a newsgroup (see section B.1.2) and see if someone can solve your problem. Or try doing the same thing with a different SSH client and see if it works with that. Please do not report it as a PuTTY bug unless you are really sure it is a bug in PuTTY.
• If someone else installed PuTTY for you, or you're using PuTTY on someone else's computer, try asking them for help first. They're more likely to understand how they installed it and what they expected you to use it for than we are.
• If you have successfully made a connection to your server and now need to know what to type at the server's command prompt, or other details of how to use the server-end software, talk to your server's system administrator. This is not the PuTTY team's problem. PuTTY is only a communications tool, like a telephone; if you can't speak the same language as the person at the other end of the phone, it isn't the telephone company's job to teach it to you.

If you absolutely cannot get a support question answered any other way, you can try mailing it to us, but we can't guarantee to have time to answer it.