Ben Bucksch wrote:
>
> 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).
Complaining about Bugs???
How do the Bugs get fixed; or are even considered as bugs, if no one
complains about them?
If you have only two or three people complaining about a bug its may be
a small bug that can be overlooked or worked on on a later date.
However; if you have 10 or 20 thousand people complaining about a bug.
(number exaggeration make a point). That bug had better be looked at
ASAP.
Even if they are some poor dumb � � � people like me doing the complaining.
If you complain about the amount of bug reports, then that is your
problem. Not the people submitting the bugs.
They tried the product, they found something not working, they submitted
a bug report and expect someone(s) to fix it.
If just the people that write the code are the only ones allowed to
submit bugs, your not going to get many bug reports, because software
authors will not want to gore another author. (It's called "Burning
Bridges" <grin>.)
> >> 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.
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