I suggest some editing of the Community page on SF. I believe that some
sections should be written differently, organized slightly differently, tell
people explicitly the things they need to know, do not assume that they know.
Example: "Join SF today to enjoy the community forum, check out and upload
content, report bugs, request features, and help LMMS grow! <signup link>". Or
something. They have many reasons to join SF now, when it is said that way. The
site concept is not as mysterious anymore, because you have just explained what
is in there. It is not anymore "some techie site and I am not a programmer, so
I will just download because there is no use of me joining". They help LMMS
grow = they can do something = they matter. And this needs to be right under
the social networks or on the top. So what is familiar on that page? Social
media and Soundcloud. You are right that a new forum should not be made. I was
wrong. It would make things very scattered and I admit it is much wiser
decision to strengthen the existing one and have all on one place. SF is not
intimidating if the "PR" section is written the right way.
NOTE: I could swear to God there was some place where I downloaded skins for
LMMS, trying to find that page later but it vanished. After some time, I find
the skins on accident under "Share your songs". This needs to be renamed User
Content or something else more intuitive, as right now it is very hard to find.
Nobody will get the idea to look for tutorials, or skins, under Share your
songs.
The question is where do YOU want the users to be. Do you want people to be on
SF, hanging out and contributing? Make it a priority. Bigger font, or a
prominent place on the page. For the rest, tell them where to go according to
their interests. It is reasonable to assume that most people will want to be on
SF and some social media for short news or uploading art. The rest needs to be
in the shadow for people who look for specific things. Why not make a separate
tab for development and just deal with the users on community page?
It is not made quite clear which of the two lists is delivering what. The
purpose of a site/page/list should be the criteria for classifying, except for
social media which everyone understands - they will expect short news there.
Where do I go to report bugs? How can I be informed when new features/releases
are available? I want to be a beta tester, where do I go? etc. This is what
people ask themselves when then hit the Community page, but they do not get
clear directions. The page does not specify if i.e. the user list gets
announcements of new features/releases - this needs to be specified further so
people do not wonder what kind of mails will they be getting, it is described
too broadly. What does it mean "just talk about LMMS"?
If you want to get regular users to do what you want, you need to think how
they think and help them. Plan out where do you want them to be, imo user list
and SF forum is too much, either one or the other. A forum has the extra of
adding publicity and searchable pages, it is not as closed/private as the
mailing list. Even if the list is active, no one can access what is written and
be motivated to join. I took a look of the forum, it is much more motivating to
join. (I talk about the user list, dev list seems to work fine for developers.)
LMMS needs publicity. Forget masses and github, it will not work. For me,
GitHub could as well be in Chinese. Could there be a middleman between SF and
Github to filter out the top priorities and have the devs connected with the
users that way? This way you can focus on coding, and they stay involved with
you. Yay! Everyone wins.
I asked earlier about translation, I would like to know if I need programming
skills to translate this? Please reply just to me for this last issue as not to
spam everybody.
Thanks
On Friday, January 10, 2014 6:54 PM, Vesa <dii....@nbl.fi> wrote:
If we want an LMMS forum, I don't think it should be a new one. I think
the existing SF forum should be migrated to a new place. The SF forum is
still active, there's not much activity but there is some - there are
new posts every day, there are even new users almost every day, asking
for advice on things.
I think it's mostly slow there because it's... slow. The SF forum is
horribly slow, it takes ages to load pages. That's probably part of the
reason why it sees little use. But there is use, there are some forum
regulars posting new tracks, new resources, plugins - the Bitrot LADSPA
plugins for one thing, those are even something I think would be great
to include in LMMS - but the forum is slow and using it is not pleasant,
so it's no wonder the activity is minimal.
If we start a new forum from scratch, it's just going to split the
userbase again - a small community doesn't need to be divided to dozens
of tiny islands. So I think
the best action to take, forum-wise, would
be to migrate the SF forum to a new, better platform.
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