On Tue, Jun 27, 2000 at 12:08:28PM -0400, David T-G wrote:
-> Hi, everyone in general --
->
-> Without going too far into the whole argument of what's intuitive or not
-> and without condemning too much, I hope, those users who get in our way
-> and keep us from doing what we should be able to do (read mail and surf
-> and occasionally fix systems :-) I would say that this *is* becoming a
-> FAQ and it's because folks aren't reading the docs.
The docs are user hostile, and not merely difficult to read. For many
people they are impossible to read.
They are difficult or impossible to read because 1) they are organized by
function name. This is dandy if you have function phoo in front of you and
want to know what it does. It is utterly useless if you want to phoo, and
don't know that it's called phooing, and the name of the function to do it
is phoo. Reason 2) is because it assumes a lot of knowledge on the
readers' part. Things like the fact that procmail exists.
->
-> It seems that mutt is cresting one of those points of explosive growth
-> where we see a massive influx of clueless newbies -- perhaps, due to
Clueless newbies indeed -- many if not all are coming to mutt and Linux in
general from Windows. Mail on Windows is trivially easy: you fire up
Outlook Express, put in a bare minimum of information, and sit back and
wait. You get a trojan horse, it eats your hard drive, you install the
next version of Windows, and repeat. Real simple.
-> the easy availability of Linux and even other more mainstream *NIX
-> distributions, so new that they don't even know how things work in The
-> Right World (tm) -- and have to deal with a bunch of questions that seem
-> pretty darned dumb even when we look back to the days when we were young
-> and lusers ourselves.
->
-> Unfortunately, this translates directly into more traffic on the mailing
-> lists that is of fairly low interest to at least the Original Ones; after
-> all, who wants to keep telling people why mutt doesn't talk on port 25 or
-> how to configure pgp or why color works with vim but not mutt or even how
-> to group reply. Note that I'm guilty, in recent times, of some of these
-> questions myself; I'd like to think that I've done my homework and found
-> the documentation confusing or lacking, but it's more probable that I
-> just didn't do my homework, either. The problem, though, is that some of
-> the Original Ones are getting tired of this crap and are unsubscribing or
-> strongly contemplating it. I can hardly blame them; I saw the same
-> decline on the sun-managers list a couple of years ago, and went that
-> route myself.
I concur. What we need to do is lower the traffic on this list.
->
-> It seems to me, though I certainly speak not from any position of
-> authority, that we as the mutt community need to come up with some Quick
-> Start and "mutt for the impatient" docs, perhaps along the lines of the
-> proposed "mutt for Attorneys" item mentioned recently, to head off some
-> of the questions but also to come up with some more proactive methods
-> of getting this information out. Without going into a drawn-out call
-> for votes or anything silly like that, what does anyone think about
->
-> - asking, most very humbly, the doc writers to spend some time on the
-> FAQ or Quick Start, even at the expense of the full documentation,
-> just to round it out and provide something to throw at requesters
This would be good.
-> - somehow more strongly expecting those who post questions to post
-> summaries (even if it's a summary of lack of response)
This is excellent. As a programmer and technical documentor myself, I can
tell you that this is far and away the best thing the neophyte who has a
question can do to return value to freeware.
-> - better promoting the searchable archives and perhaps redesigning the
-> main mutt page to first send folks to answers
Good.
-> - a mail server (my favorite idea :-) to which folks can forward such
-> requests that spits out a form letter to the requester pointing him
-> to the proper places to search (archives, FAQ, manual) and the manual
-> section where the option(s) is(are) defined
You get to write the procmail recipes. :-) It's a good idea but a lot of work.
->
-> for starters? Heck, maybe the Muttrc included in RPMs could pop up a
-> message saying "Don't ask; read first" until the user figures out how to
-> get rid of it, and the Makefile in the tarball could require that one
-> read a similar message before the compile will proceed...
This will kill interest in using mutt faster than anything I can think of
short of making it an exclusively Windows package.
But at least you are thinking of things and tossing them out there for
consideration. Good for you.
--
-- C^2
No windows were crashed in the making of this email.
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