That's a good point. When a project has wikis, maillist, forums and (support) trackers, etc. all turned on, these all will have prominent 'tabs' on the project pages.

Generically, a user can receive 'support', in various forms, from the content of all these venues. Depending on the details and culture of how a project uses these resources, some of this support is from the collective wisdom of the user community as a whole, some is directed support from the developers, and others are a mix of both types (such as SPM or FSL millists...).

From the users perspective, with all these tabs potentially available, if I have a question that I specifically want to pose to the developers (after reading the manual and FAQ and reviewing the mail lists and forums, of course), it may not be clear what the developers preferred means of communication is (if any!).

So, you're right, 'Support' as a tab may have been too generic a term in the way I originally suggested it. Or a 'Support' tab might be better pointed at a wiki (or other developer controlled location) that explicitly states the types and locations of support that a project provides.

I guess the 'best practices' question here is how to make users aware of the types of support a project (commercial or academic) provides. And we want to expose this, of course, because gently raising the level of 'support' that is available even from publicly funded, academic tools should be a good thing.

Thanks for the feedback!