Simon P. Lucy wrote:
> At 13:08 08/12/2000 +0100, Ben Bucksch wrote:
>
>> Simon P. Lucy wrote:
>>
>>> For those users that stray into mozilla.org user groups they need
>>> to be steered correctly into the right channel for their distribution.
>>
>> As I said, m.users won't help us here. They will either go to
>> netscape.communicator or m.apps.mailnews. Why should they go to m.users?
>
> Why shouldn't they?
In order to make this group keep traffic away from dev groups, it has to
be very "catchy". m.users isn't.
If you want to keep Netscape users away, make Netscape add groups in its
hierarchy with the right names, e.g. netscape.netscape6.mailnews and
n.n.browser or n.n.navigator.
If you want to keep Mozilla users away from dev groups, see below.
> If you make the software open to only developers all you've done is to
> put a nice canvas covered extension on the side of the Cathedral and
> called it the Bazaar.
It's a Bazaar for developers, people in general.
Sure, contact to users is important, but IMO, we have too much of it
currently. See all the ranting in bug reports and what it causes for
developers (e.g. timeless, who is *endlessly* annoyed about people
complaining about bugs).
>> consume a lot of resources for help. I didn't see many useful bug
>> reports from Beonex users. But I spent a *ton* (too much) of time
>> answering FAQs.
>
> I understand that, I just think that waving FAQs at users and
> expecting them to use them is missing the point.
I didn't say to throw FAQs at them - I know it won't help. I am
suggesting to kepp all users away, from the beginning.
> I don't think it matters whether there is a strict policy or not,
> users will still wander into places that aren't designed for them.
Right, but a non-strict policy worses the problem a lot.
> unless mozilla.org refrains from producing binaries (which is
> possible), mozilla.org is de facto a distributor
Right. That's the largest cause for the problem.
Whether it's the right decision to produce Milestone *binary* builds or
not is not clear. Testers and developers have use for Milestones only
for a limited time of e.g. a week. After that time, they are only used
by users, leading hardly to any good bug reports, only feature
suggestions and priorization of bugs, but then again, there are other
means to get that, e.g. through distributors. OTOH, those users,
together with the current organization, cause a lof of problems, like
those mentioned in this post.
> and should support its own builds.
User support is a massive, time-consuming task and also requires a
completely different website etc.. Is mozilla.org willing to make that
change?
Imagine you are a user. What would you think about the website (e.g.
click on "mozilla0.6" and you get the release-notes, not a description),
3 MB of test programs in the binaries, questionable features enabled for
testing (because some distributors, usually Netscape, need them) etc.?
IMO, mozilla.org does an extremely poor job of supporting end-users and
is only used because of its high profile /and/ because it produces
binaries. Why should we push mozilla.org as distributor further without
changing mozilla.org completely?
> Now I think it should encourage possible users to take an end user
> distribution, either Netscape 6 or Beonex at the moment, rather than
> a nightly release, however, I do think it also needs to support
> distributors properly (as in the security issues you've brought up
> elsewhere).
Agreed in both points.
The first goal could be achieved by reworking the homepage to an
introduction to Mozilla and mozilla.org, leading (in part) into a
redirection to distributors for users. www.mozilla.org, as is,
encourages to use Milestones.
