Hi Randy, > My name is Randy Nielsen and I am a documentation manager at Macromedia. > I mostly work on ColdFusion, JRun, and Flex, but along the way, I have > inherited responsibility for our documentation commenting system, which > we call LiveDocs (http://livedocs.macromedia.com/ ). This system is very > similar to the one you use for PHP, and it has proven invaluable in a > variety of ways. > > You’re probably wondering where I’m going with this. > > We are currently drowning in a sea of support questions, bug > notifications, and feature requests. At least 60% of our comments have > nothing to do with the docs and as part of figuring a way out of this > problem, I looked at your site and came upon this page: > http://www.php.net/manual/add-note.php?sect=function.base64-encode&redirect=http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.base64-encode.php > > I felt like I’d found a long-lost brother or sister. Do you mind if I > ask you a few questions about how this is working? I imagine we can > commiserate, too. > > Before I go any further, please let me know if you have time for this > discussion.
Well, all the code is open source, so you can look behind the scenes. The basic idea is that a new note gets into a central database, and also gets mailed to a mailing list read my the moderators ([EMAIL PROTECTED]). The mail sent out contains action links as well as the online interface if one is logged in with a php.net user name. These enable the editors to remove, reject or edit notes. That's it... We have no problem with immediate removal of support questions, since we are not a company and the add note page explicitly states that these does not belong to the notes... Irrelevant stuff is mostly quickly removed, and forgotten. Relevant code can be found at cvs.php.net in the phpweb and php-master-web modules. BTW while we are at it, we also have a system called livedocs :) It is a Docbook XML display engine, somewhat optimized for the constructs we use in the PHP documentation. I don't know if you have any problem with us having this system named livedocs. Look here for info: http://cvs.php.net/livedocs/ Regards, Gabor Hojtsy
