Hey Matt, Appreciate you taking the time to stay in touch with this list. It sounds like Adobe has some great plans for the Flex forums that might improve the experience that people have commented on. I look forward to see what the somewhat near future brings. The only thing that I can say is that it is our diversity that helps us evolve and grow. This thread is a perfect example; many differrent opinions, but one place to discuss them. I personally like this list the way that it is, but absolutely appreciate everyone's opinion and hope that the Adobe forums become a place for more granular posts. For this list though, there's not a day that goes by when I don't scan a topic that isn't related to my work, but gives an insight to another side of flex. While there are those that would want to isolate us into compartmnents, I think that having a general community list provides value to all of us.
-TH --- In [email protected], Matt Chotin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > As far as stats, we've had about 100 people join in the last week. I don't know how many folks unsubscribed, that seems to be a little harder to track easily and I don't have time to read through all the logs (if someone would like to write some scripts to go through the logs and build up these kinds of stats let me know and I'll get you access). Also hard to know how many of the folks who joined are spammers, but I don't think that many :-) > > This is a tough position for me to comment on because we want the community to thrive and have a life of its own that isn't controlled by Adobe. That said, we clearly want to see it succeed and will involve ourselves as necessary to try to make that happen. > > Based on the comments I'm seeing in this thread I don't see the big clamor to divide the list. I see folks who have figured out workflows that work for them, and suggestions for how to make things more manageable. That said, the issue that Anatole raises is whether we are preventing new users from getting help, or preventing advanced users from participating. Most of those folks who have been "hurt" we can assume are folks who are not on the list anymore, so it's difficult to really know without some sort of data as to why they left the list. If people are willing to wait a few weeks, maybe we could work on trying to gather that data and make a decision after. Another piece of data we could use is an analysis of the kinds of posts that have happened recently, perhaps compared to posts from a year ago, and see if the skill level of posters is increasing, how many threads are going un answered, semi-subjective view of signal vs. noise. This would help us understand if there is meaning behind the low rate of increase in total number of members, as well as the generally flat nature of posts per month. > > Does doing this kind of analysis interest anyone? Are the folks who advocate separating the list interested in waiting for this kind of analysis? For me, it seems kind of critical to have real data before making this kind of decision, as we're going with hunches as to what's really happening here. I'd have a hard time getting behind a real split when we don't know if doing so would actually improve things. > > Matt > > > On 6/17/08 3:15 PM, "Anatole Tartakovsky" [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > > > > Doug, > As far as I know, I am the only one in the NY office who did not unsubscribe from the group. Looks at the stats ( provided by Tim) or just go to the group page. Also, the number of users if I remember it correctly has been in 9K for at least 6 month - meaning you have the same number of people in and OUT - obviously you need to ask Matt if he has more detailed stats on unsubscribes count. > Regards, > Anatole > > On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 5:35 PM, Doug McCune [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Actually, this is worth going back to, because your initial email said that the group was "stagnant" and has plateaued with the number of new users and questions. Except your reason for bringing it up is that the traffic has gotten too much for you to read every message. So clearly the level of traffic isn't stagnant. Unless what you're saying is that about 6 months ago the traffic reached a critical level where you couldn't deal with the traffic but then it stopped growing. > > So I guess I'm saying I question the claim that this list is "stagnant". Almost 10,000 members and an average of 100 messages a day. Are you saying that these stats have been the same for the past 6 months? And even if that is true (although I'd like to see numbers before I accept that) then I don't even necessarily think that this indicates that there's a problem. There's a simple fact that a ton of questions have already been accurately answered by this list. I would hope that the archived knowledge of the list serves to answer more and more questions that newcomers have, meaning they don't need to post the questions over and over. > > What is the real problem? I haven't heard anyone say that the traffic on this single list has stopped them from asking any questions (although I'm open to the possibility that this is true, and just hasn't been voiced). And largely I think that the number of people answering questions has remained high and the response times are still good. I have heard that the traffic level has stopped people from reading the questions that others ask (I certainly skim and sometimes skip entire days). I'd argue that a combination of self-moderated subject tagging, as well as more aggressive pointing repeat questions to cached answered (and then tagging the entire thread as a repeat) will largely solve this problem. > > So do you have numbers that indicate the stagnation you are worried about? > > Doug > > > On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 1:28 PM, Anatole Tartakovsky [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Matt, > Let us review the goal - in the original post I explained that single group causes stagnation. If you agree with the numbers and reasoning behind it, let us look at the proposition in that light. IMHO, the mentioned measures while staying within the same single group would probably extend the number of users by 20-30% byhoping to reduce number of posted messages by the same percentage - but it is hardly the goal we are trying to achieve here. > > Realistically Adobe should be looking for place public pace to exchange ideas and networking as well as getting trivial help. The product and community are just too big for one group. Let us split it up and let each subgroup speak their own language. I would gladly moderate standalone enterprise/j2ee/best practices track. But looking few times a day @ the whole stream to fish out what might be related to the topic and having some messages falling through the cracks might be not the recommended "best practices" solution. > > Sincerely, > Anatole > > > > > On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 1:48 PM, Matt Chotin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > 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 >
