Hey folks, let's calm down a little here, K? Alright, based on what I've been seeing people say, here's my suggestion.
1) Let's get an FAQ going that can be edited by moderators or members of the community. This will be about common problems that folks run into. One suggestion of course from me would be that we use the Cookbook for "how-to" type questions. But for things that don't seem like they're cookbook appropriate, we can put them in the FAQ. I like the idea of doing it in Buzzword, though Buzzword docs won't come up in Google. Long-term I think the right place might be in whatever we set up in the Adobe Developer Center. But for now how about we just allocate a page off of the opensource wiki. We can pick some moderators who can edit the page and I will get them added so they can take care of it. We can also add the link to the FAQ to the bottom of every email. 2) Some folks suggested that you either mark in the body or in the subject something that indicates what you're talking about. Seems reasonable. We could use some of the topics that were being suggested. [UX], [Enterprise], [Data Services] [Announce], etc. We don't need to limit this, but by following a convention of placing the general area of discussion, folks will know if they're going to be capable of getting involved in the thread. The more people follow this convention, the more efficient it will become. 3) We can get aggressive on the moderation. Rather than just scanning for spam, moderators can actually look at the posts by new users and decide if they meet the general criteria for asking a question. If they don't, the moderator can reject the post and point the user to the forum FAQ which has posting guidelines. 4) We can update the flexcoders FAQ (which is actually linked at the bottom of every single post) to include the updated posting guidelines and remove the common questions section so that the forum FAQ is only about forum etiquette and the coding FAQ is about the actual problems. If this sounds OK then what we need are the two kinds of moderators: 1. moderators for the forum itself who are willing to really look at all posts that are in moderation and analyze whether they should be passed through. If it is a poorly formed question, the post should be rejected with a pointer to the forum FAQ. 2. moderators for the FAQ who can pay attention to common questions and update the FAQ as appropriate. If we're all on board, send those moderators to me and we can get things set up. And folks can start following the tagging convention instantly in the meantime. Matt
