On Wednesday 31 December 2008 20:53, Matthew Toseland wrote: > First the main reasons: > > "Not enough interesting content" 1509 : 31% > "I was not able to get it running!" : 1050 : 22% > "It takes too long to retrieve content from it" 771 : 16% > "It slowed down my computer" 612 : 13% > "It worked initially, but then stopped working" 387 : 8% > "It slowed down my Internet connection" 328 : 7% > "The content I found was objectionable" 144 : 3% > General conclusions (these are probably not very reliable:
FIREFOX PROBLEMS ============ It is critical that we fix the firefox problems ASAP. Many many users have seen their firefox profile clobbered by Freenet, including one student who lost all the URLs he'd collected over a term that he needed for his finals. VISTA PROBLEMS ========== A lot of the problems reported with installing/running Freenet seem to be Vista-related. Running anonymity software on Vista may seem to you or me to be utterly absurd and a clear sign of juvenile (or senile) dementia, but a lot of the people who download Freenet are running Vista; and also, a lot of the people who do run Vista may have more than average RAM, which will help (on the other hand they probably have a greater than average proportion of laptops...) RUNNING 24x7 ========= Very many users object to Freenet running 24x7. No doubt this is exacerbated by Freenet tending to use lots of memory, RAM and bandwidth, but I don't see any way we can accomodate the users here: Freenet simply WILL NOT work well if we have an average of 5% uptime. Some users complain that there is no easy way to shut Freenet down, and eventually uninstall it as this is their only option - either they haven't seen the desktop/start menu start/stop links, or they don't work (probably because of Vista problems). IMHO a systray icon would help. RUNNING AS A DEDICATED USER ==================== At least one user saw his XP login screen changed as a result of Freenet adding a user to run under. A number of users complained about it, or gave it as a reason for uninstalling. We have discussed it at length and I really don't see much alternative on Windows due to permissions problems ... TRANSLATION ISSUES ============= Some users reported lack of translations in German or Swedish. USER FRIENDLINESS, FILESHARING AND GUIS =========================== A number of users complained about the lack of a GUI or made similar comments. Clearly we have a GUI, but it's not very user friendly for the average newbie. The lack of integrated functionality in fproxy is a problem, and the lack of what is normally regarded as filesharing - searching for files. There are many complaints about it being over-complex, or not knowing what to do, etc etc. Many users seem to think that a web interface is a bad thing, and that a non-web interface is automatically better; a poor web interface is of course not as good as a good non-web interface, but IMHO 90% of these people use gmail, yahoo or similar for their email! Also, many users complained about the lack of documentation. IMHO documentation is an admission that the system is not user friendly - but maybe Freenet is inherently not user friendly, perhaps there are parts of it that must be documented and are not sufficiently yet. UPDATING, STANDALONE INSTALLER, HOSTILE REGIMES ================================= There are some hints that Freenet starts up and doesn't update itself, or doesn't say that it's updating, or just says it's out of date and should be updated. Users then uninstall it because they assume it won't update itself - it would have said so. So we should tell the user, on the front page, not just on the messages page, that we are trying to update Freenet, and not to panic unless it fails. Also at least one user in Iran attempted to download Freenet to bypass the local filters, and failed because he didn't use the offline version; the non-offline version attempted to download the files directly and didn't work. This is yet another reason to ship an offline installer, IMHO this is probably true of many Chinese, Iranian etc users. CPU USAGE ETC ========== Many users complained about CPU usage and/or memory usage. We can improve on this with db4o. One user complained about constant disk access, I doubt we can improve much on this. A few users complained about disk space usage being excessive; this is a direct result of us not asking users in the setup how much disk space it should use. FRIENDS ====== Some users uninstalled because they don't have many friends, this may be because they missed the fact that they could set seclevel to NORMAL and use opennet ... or it may be because they didn't want to. BANDWIDTH ======== Some users complained about bandwidth usage. We can introduce a bandwidth scheduler perhaps, but in general there isn't much we can do about this. Maybe we should be clearer about it being peer to peer on the download page, that's jargon that people understand on the whole. GENERAL CONCLUSIONS =============== IMHO we can improve user friendliness significantly. However, Freenet does not easily align with people preconceptions. It simply must run in the background, or performance for the whole network will be very poor. It has many security issues which need to be explained, and people often do not readily understand them, uninstalling because they have no friends etc. It's a server which uses bandwidth, CPU, RAM, and disk continually, and this may not be acceptable to many users - in fact it may not be acceptable to MOST users, especially with the increasing predominance of laptops. IMHO Freenet may simply not be compatible with most users - there is simply too much to deal with, on every level, too much that a user simply must know and can't be bothered to read or choose. Maybe as in the disk space issue it's a mistake to try to over-simplify and auto-detect ... one problem is we cannot tell the user that Freenet will auto-start and run 24x7 in the post-install wizard with the rest of such choices and info, we would have to tell them in the installer :| -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 827 bytes Desc: not available URL: <https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/devl/attachments/20081231/927762f4/attachment.pgp>
