This is great. Can we get someone with access to the blog to post it?
The only thing that might be added are a couple links:
* to the main forum at it's new location in the first line (which is
of course, it's old location - but a link to the main forum entrance
would be nice)
* a link to the survival guide where that's mentioned
Thanks for this,
Andrew
Le ven. 30 déc. 2011 09:57:45 CET, Andrew Rist
<[email protected]> a écrit :
This is great stuff - any way this could be posted as a blog post on
the main AOO blog?
Andrew
Here is a proposal.
___________________________________
The Community Forum: New Year Status
After 4 years of existence, the Community Forum has moved on the ASF
servers end of October 2011. Here are some figures about how we are
doing on the English forum. I will try to make this kind of report on
a monthly basis in the forum
(http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=50&t=46497)
but not on the blog. This post is just to announce it.
Some history first. To make a long story short: fearing the
disappearance of the first forum (http://www.oooforum.org) due to spam
especially, a group of users decided to create a new forum managed by
the users themselves. Topics about the whole story can be found on
both forums. By luck, Sun offered to host the forum on their servers
in Hamburg (for free) but our independence was part of the deal. The
forum has been tagged “official” rather wrongly: even if we were on
Sun then Oracle hardware, they both have never interfered in the
running of the forum and we are deeply grateful for that.
To manage the forum, a group of Volunteers has been settled. It was
first made of the users who departed from oooforum (some still
contribute to it) and then users have been integrated when their
contribution showed a true dedication to the forum (steady activity
and quality of posts). We had a private area (not visible by standard
users) where the management of the forum could be discussed like
moderation, forum software features, … So the forum is really managed
by a group of users helping other users (for free, on their spare time).
Participation is really easy: just register and post your question! (a
search before is of course welcomed but well, we are prepared to the
eternal September). A survival guide is available, covering all the
basic questions a new forum user could have. And if you want to have
your say, you can apply for the Volunteer status. You can also
subscribe to topics (no need to post) to be notified when new replies
are posted.
Note that the forum has never been a marketing tool. Our target is not
to promote OOo blindly but to give the best advice as possible to get
the users out of the trouble he is facing. Therefore, advising to keep
other software (including proprietary suites) is part of our replies.
The forum is also dedicated to OOo derived products and for them, the
only limit is the user base visiting the forum. Many of us run
LibreOffice in parallel for example.
Power users are OOo users like you and me, we usually use one or two
components much more than the others and we reply with our own
experience (trials and a kind of reverse engineering sometimes). Some
have also great skills for macros and give their code snippets
(dedicated section). We are from all over the world and the success
led to the creation of other native language sections.
As you can see, the forum is really a major part of the OOo project.
The dedication of the helpers has led to a steady rate of the
registration as you can see below. The figures start at day 1 when the
creation of the forum has been announced on the mailing list.
Some basics then:
- The number of posts, members and topics is taken from the phpBB
information bottom of main index page
- Solved topics are counted in all the forums except admin and
archives sections (not visible to standard users)
Note that the ratio solved topics vs. total topics is slightly biased
since the topics in the archives and admin sections are counted (in
phpBB statistics) but not the solved ones (custom search). However,
there are less than 550 topics there (in more than a 40,000 grand
total, so less than 1.5%). These last figures shouldn't change very
much since the private sections are not very active.
Here it is (since the solved topics is a new metric, there is only one
point for the moment).
[img]http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/download/file.php?id=13066&mode=view[/img]
The blue line (number of posts) is not that important, it just shows
that the trend is consistent with the other metrics.
The most interesting statistics are the red lines for the members and
the topics (with triangles, giving the time when the figures have been
recorded). Note that the ratio topics vs. members is 0.9 for the
English forum and above 1.5 for the French and Japanese forums. We
tend not to be too harsh for the rules on the English section and
topics are not often split when different users ask questions (still
related of course) in the same thread.
Activity has a slightly higher slope during the first 2 years. It may
be linked to the building of the knowledge database. Once the main
issues and common questions have been discussed, users find their
answers more and more easily with a mere search, hence less topics
needed.
Neither the release of LibreOffice (Oct 2010), nor the move to the ASF
servers (Oct 2011) have changed anything for the activity.
The decrease in the number of members (end of 2011) is linked to the
cleaning of banned users. They had just been banned until now but to
keep only the "real users", their account has been deleted (nearly
1800). This was the first cleaning ever done from the launch of this
forum 4 years ago. 1550 of them had been identified as spammers
because of their post(s). 250 were passive spam (link in signature or
interest field of the profile, without any post).
The ratio of the solved topics is rather good: 14,000 solved (green
triangle) in 41,000 (red triangles), that makes more than 1 in 3 (all
users don't bother to tag their topic as solved).
For the record, last quarter has been in line with the rest: 2100 new
users from Oct 1st to end of this year, meaning 1800 new topics.
As for the spam, we have had 1800 users in 1500 days, it makes 1.21
spammer a day, still rather low, thanks to the registration process
(hard to cheat for bots).
Last figures: 2011 has shown an increase in the max number of online
users along the months. Peak reached 232 beginning of October. The
counter has been reset on Jan 1st 2012 and is already at 214, proving
the audience is still there.
Some words about the team. Let's not forget Terry Ellison who was the
main maintainer of the forum until the move to ASF servers. His huge
involvement has made it possible for both a clean running of the forum
during 4 years, making it a great place for those needing/providing
help, and contributing to the transfer of the forum to the ASF servers
with a minimal impact for the users.
As for the Volunteers, 4 new users have been promoted in December 2011
(the last approval was in April). Total is nearly 100 now.
To conclude, the constant dedication of the Volunteers shows that they
are still eager to help users through the forum. We are now waiting
for the next release of Apache OpenOffice for a new bunch of questions
and users...
Hagar Delest,
On the behalf of the Forum Volunteers
--
Andrew Rist | Interoperability Architect
OracleCorporate Architecture Group
Redwood Shores, CA | 650.506.9847
