Apologies for not responding sooner -- I've been spending my spare moments since Thursday dealing with questions and bugs relating to 4.0.
On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 10:46 AM, Marc Paré <m...@marcpare.com> wrote: > > The FAQ section was indeed changed to the "About Us" section after a > discussion on the marketing list that I initiated. The rationale behind this > is/was that the FAQ was not being used for LibreOffice specific questions > and had been set up in 2010 prior to Ask.LibreOffice.org. The Ask site was > put together in order to provide users with a more organized zone for such > information as well as to replace the FAQ. > > Before moving the FAQ, I looked for, and found, the answers to all questions > on the FAQ's that related to question regarding "problem fixing" with > LibreOffice on the Ask.LibreOffice.org site. These FAQ items were then > purged from the FAQ and the FAQ was moved to the "About Us" section. > Okay, so to summarize, the FAQ was slimmed-down, purged of questions regarding "problem-fixing", and moved under the "About Us" section. Gotcha. > As well, the larger questions then remaining on the FAQ related to the > TDF/LibreOffice project. Thus, the About Us section was decided as the most > appropriate section of the site to post it. So, the FAQ on the About Us > section is not a general LibreOffice FAQ section for trouble shooting, but > an FAQ with regards to historical questions relating to the > community/project Ah okay. This FAQ has a historical component to it. > and of information relating to Licensing question, which > we must publish as per LGPL rules. I don't believe that we have any obligations under the LGPL to distribute anything other than the code (or content) + the LGPL license. It's beneficial for us to have a Licensing FAQ, but I don't think it's something we must have. > BTW, the FAQ may even be cut back even > further once I we update the site a bit more. IMO, that particular FAQ will > not appear in its present state for long, this, of course depending on our > (marketing or website or ...) prioritized "to-do" lists. Fair enough. The FAQ is rather small, so it might be easiest to consolidate the questions and answers to a single page. >> * We have 3+ FAQs and the Ask site -- what can we do to reduce >> repetition? (DRY) > > I have gone to all three FAQ's and have found no duplication of information. > In fact all three FAQ's are quite specific to their particular area which is > where I would assume a user/members would go to first look/find an answer to > their question. But, reasonably speaking, our sites are quite large, and > even I get lost with the amount of information available on the pages > (especially the wiki). Yes, that's definitely something that happens to me :-) When I first went to the odfauthors.org site, I thought that it was a site for end-users because of the highly-prominent links to books for sale, but now I believe that the website is largely focused on internal production. Perhaps there's something we can do to make things more clear to regular users as well as to our volunteer community. > I am sorry if the "Get Help" FAQ move caused this headache. Let me know if > there has been a loss of some important information and I will make > arrangements to post it back onto the Ask.LibreOffice.org site for future > reference. Thanks. Is all of the content on that site available under a license compatible with that of the Ask site? (CC-BY-SA 3.0) If so, I can just copy-in anything I need from the cached copy up on Archive.org. > As for the duplication of the FAQ of information and the Ask.LibreOffice.org > site as well as of updating/syncing this information -- no, no such > discussions have occurred. Be aware, that from time to time these FAQ may be > rationalized depending on their various team's decisions, also be aware that > the product of the FAQ information on the wiki pages are not from user > questions BUT more from the contributing members organizing of the > information/materials ... so, sometime, the information is more relative to > the contributing member and not a regular user. Okay, cool. I was just curious to see how much conversation was going on :-) > HOWEVER, the bottom line is that we are here to help our users with > questions and to provide them with the best answers we can possibly offer. I definitely agree! > IMO, most questions users ask on the Ask.LibreOffice.org site are probably > best answered there, and, IMO, I don't see a reason to work on any > user-related FAQ when the Ask.LibreOffice.org site is probably the best type > of solution for a good living/breathing FAQ site. Using the Ask site as the general FAQ as we go forward sounds like a solid plan to me. The FAQ on the wiki currently has some overlap with the Ask site: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Faq What do you guys think about migrating questions from that FAQ to the Ask site? I'd be happy to shepherd that work, if that's amenable to you. > My question to you now is this; have the mods/admins discussed eliminating > duplicated questions on the Ask.LibreOffice.org site in order to make it > more effective? We've had some discussion, but we certainly need to have more! :-) On the Ask site mods have the ability to close questions as duplicates, and now that we've got a few more active mods, we're working on cleaning-up a large backlog of out-of-date and "abandoned" questions. Out of 3000 questions, about 1,500 are still open (i.e. they haven't been closed or resolved with a good answer). One of the best ways for us to improve the quality of the Ask site and to make it more effective is to improve the quality of the question titles. A title of "Form Scrambled" or "soffice.bin" is much less helpful than "Base: How can I make the fields on my contact management form save their position?" or "Why is Comodo antivirus giving me a CloudScanner.Trojan.Gen@2@1 alert for soffice.bin when I try to open LO 4.0.0.3?". For now, only mods and very-high-karma users can make these changes, so it'll take a little while to work through the site. I've been talking with Joel Madero and Joren De Cuyper (QA) about ways that we can improve communication between different groups of people. It's great to be able to ask the QA folks what they think should end up in the bugtracker and what they think should stay as a question on the Ask site, or coordinate on some other aspect of the project. I'd love to see similar collaboration/easy communication with other groups like the Documentation Team. A few ideas off the top of my head - When answering a Q, there should be a clear/easy way to ask the Doc Team where to find the latest documentation on a particular topic - If "How do I do X?" comes up and we don't have (can't find?) good docs on it, there should be an easy way to ping the Doc team about the need [File as an enhancement bug?] - The text of really good Answers should be fed back to the Doc team for inclusion in the next iteration of the documentation [Not sure if this should be a pull or a push action] Again, thank you for the detailed answers. Please let me know about my questions/suggestions, and if you have any further suggestions about collaboration! Cheers, --Robinson 'qubit' Tryon -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to documentation+h...@global.libreoffice.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/documentation/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
