Very carefully.
First and foremost, do not let the other person give you their login credentials. If they do, don't use them. Doing that will result in a suspended membership. That will cause both of you all kinds of problems and misery without helping anybody.
That means that to help someone else with our service, you're going to need a (free) membership of your own. There are two fundamental reasons for this:
- When you go to the signup page, you'll see bold print warnings that memberships are created for individuals (not companies or organizations) and that they may not be created for others, transferred, or shared. Make sure you heed those warnings. If you don't: suspended → problems and misery → nobody helped.
- Creating your own membership will allow you to look around our system and make sure that you're familiar with the features and limitations of our service and that you're comfortable that you can provide the necessary help.
Second, it matters what type of help they need from you.
If the person only needs help managing a website's content, we have a feature called adjunct access that allows one member to edit another member's site. There's no fee for that; you can create a membership and be given adjunct access to another person's site without ever paying anything. Full information about adjunct access is available in the version of our FAQ on our member site.
We also offer the ability to share an account between multiple members. Account sharing is the best way to organize complex projects or hosting for organizations where more than one person must be involved. Account sharing doesn't require anyone but the "main" member to pay anything. Full information about this is also available in the version of our FAQ on our member site.
If the person needs more help than that, there are two basic ways to proceed.
- If you want to take over completely, you and the other person can each log in to your own memberships and submit free requests to transfer their stuff to you. The process for this is also described in our member FAQ. For simplicity's sake, what the other person will ask to have transferred, and what you will ask to receive, is "everything."
- If the above is not possible or not desirable, or if you need more help from us for some special situation, the other person will have to contact us through our site and give us explicit permission to discuss all the details of their membership with you. Once that's done, you can contact us the same way to have that discussion. Then, and only then, we can work with you to figure out the best way forward. Note that both parties will need subscription memberships (our higher, more expensive tier of membership which includes individual private support) to do this.
It's important to emphasize that due to our privacy policy, we will not under any circumstances discuss the details of any person's membership with any other person in the absence of their express written consent provided through our site.