Robert Holtzman wrote:
On Sat, 17 Oct 2009, Mike Scott wrote:
IMO I think the lists should stop pretending to newbies to be a help
desk. They're not, and never will be. In the long run, I don't think
it's helpful to those newbies; and it's potentially harmful to OOo's
standing when the "help desk" cannot provide the instant answers they
want (/especially/ when pointed in our direction by unscrupulous
vendors of wrapped-up versions of OOo wanting to offer support on the
cheap to their often-duped paying customers).
In all the time I have been lurking on the discuss and users lists I
have never known them to pretend to be help desks. Not sure where you
got that idea from. Can you cite some examples?
I was really responding to Michael Adams' email, and probably worded it
badly. (He wrote:- "In that way we become a help-desk without......".)
But confusion seemed(*) evident to newbies on "users", some of whom did
seem to think it was a help-desk of some sort. My suspicion is that
these were from the people duped with expensive "sold as supported"
copies of OOo; I may be wrong of course. And, if a newbie mails in a
problem and gets his answer, he's likely to assume unless told otherwise
it's a formal help facility of some sort -- some people did trouble to
note the nature of the list in their replies, many did not (I'm not,
btw, trying to belittle the efforts over there - many of the most
knowledgeable people were extremely patient and helpful).
I said then, and still believe, that for a number of reasons it's not
good to put mail from unsubscribed users onto the lists, and mooted the
idea of an automated pattern match system of some sort to give
unsubscribed users a likely response with a note about subscribing for
better information. IIRC most of the N'th repeats of trivial questions
were from unsubscribed newbies who had no clue about searching archives
or whatever. That didn't meet with general approval though :-{
(*) I unsubscribed from 'users' nearly a year ago; things may have
changed since!
--
Mike Scott Harlow Essex England.(mike -a-t- [deletethis]
scottsonline.org.uk)
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