Hi All, I'm getting fed up with wading through support these days. Support query after support query is becoming less and less personal, and with less and less pleasant to wade through. Basics of polite communication are being lost. The culprits... forum users, not neccessarily because that people involved, but the medium has lost even more of what makes support bearable.
The problem is that support is really a conversation, and an odd one because it's a broadcast model and the extremely low bandwidth of communication - text only communication looses key attributes of normal conversation - you get not eye to eye contact, no body language, no feedback of the voice, and the nature turn taking in conversation becomes stilted. Communicating through just text is real challenge, and keeping it polite, and personable is not something that just happens automatically, it has to be worked at. Since we've had the dual mailing list and forum, technically is a very impressive feat, but alas I've seen a steady reduction in the effort in making things personable. I've tried to suggest many many times that people use sign with their names, it's something that mailing list users do, but forum users don't. Forums users are often using obscure or too common names as well. It's becoming very hard to keep track of who's who. We are starting to loose touch of who were are as a community, the key social aspect too it are not functioning as well as they once were - we are people, not faceless automaton yet the trend is to the later. I certainly can't keep up my passion for doing free support when it's becoming harder and less rewarding, and rapid increase in less person communication is sucking my energy for doing such a high level of support. Forum's might be convenient for those who them, but there is collateral damage here in the way that forum users use it. It's becoming rather soul destroying for me wading through yet another almost entirely impersonal post - I can't keep simply keep up my current levels of support up when it's just depresses me doing it. Can this be fixed? Is the dual forum/mailing list an interesting experiment but doomed because it's just too different a medium? Robert. _______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
