Le 2012-09-27 18:18, Christian Lohmaier a écrit :
Hi Marc, *,
On Thu, Sep 27, 2012 at 10:38 PM, Marc Parém...@marcpare.com wrote:
Le 2012-09-27 08:11, Christian Lohmaier a écrit :
On Thu, Sep 27, 2012 at 7:33 AM, Marc Parém...@marcpare.com wrote:
Users who have problems with installs generally do not come to a forums/list
with the idea that the be directed to a tutorial, they are more interested
in advice with a real person. Tutorials are nice as extra resource, but the
primary reason for a user who has come to a forums for installation help is
to get help by an informed person, which is what we are offering.
Oh, you're oversimplifying things here, while of course the goal is
that people get help by informed person, just creating separate
categories will not magically assure this.
Agreed about the help, but separate categories will help direct the user
to a more refined area of the site for her/his particular help.
* Catch-all/General (also the place to ask installation/configuration
problems if not covered by the tutorials) - might even consider to put
Base into this forum as well.
For installation related questions, people can be asked in a sticky to
prefix their topics with [win] [lin] [mac] (, [sol], [and] [ios],...)
We tried to do this on the contributor mailing lists and the results are
that even the contributors do not do this.
I'll scream the next time someone comes with a but on mailinglist.. argument.
For heavens sake: We're setting up a forum because it is *NOT* a mailinglist.
On a mailinglist new posters don't see existing posts. While they
could visit the archives, they usually don't, and existing posts
cannot be modified. So when someone doesn't follow the rules, it
cannot be corrected.
This is all the opposite for forums. When people see the tag being
used, they'll use it. If it is forgotten once, a moderator will add
it.
Coming with the argument that it is more work for moderators is only
halfway true.
Moderators are initially expected to scan every message that is posted
for valid content/whether it matches the forum it was posted in or
needs to be moved. So the more in effort is in actually editing the
topic. But that IMHO is a rather small burden.
Give me a warning next time you feel like screaming ... I need to cover
my ears! :-)
If you re-read my remark, I was not comparing the two systems as they
are obviously different. However, human nature is not. People in general
will not add tags to their posts and my comment was that even where a
group of people are engaged in a project (such as LibreOffice), tags are
not added. Asking people to tag their messages is IMO asking too much,
we would have to go force users to go through a learning process which
would most likely turn them off our forums.
HOWEVER, if there is a process whereby tags are offered to users at the
point of posting a message on our forums, now that is different. Is this
possible with jForums?
So, if the people engaged in the
project do not follow this rule, how could we justify asking users to do
follow this rule?
Again: It is the moderators' job that the forum rules are followed.
And contrary to mailinglists, those rules are enforceable. In a well
maintained forum you'll see many existing topics following that
schema. And if the person asking a new question is not mentally
retarded, he might get the idea just by viewing the existing topics,
without having read the sticky post/some rules on a separate page.
I've looked through a few of my forums and tags are not used, I also
visited the Ubuntu forums where tags are part of the message posting
process, but even there, some parts of site-forums do not make use of
tags (they have handled almost 4 million messages).
Anyway, sure, I am all for tags if there is a way to add tag-choices at
the message posting process, then we could help users with this learning
experience. Not so much for it, if we find that we are spending a good
bulk of our time moderating it.
But, getting back to categorization, this, I would prefer, as there is
no need to moderate tagging of messages.
I find it easier to categorize the forums to make it easier on both the
users and moderators-helpers; thereby making prefixes unnecessary.
Empty forums / forums with only a handful posts are a nuisance.
But hey, that's exactly the reason I didn't want to be coordinator,
but leave the decision to someone else :-)
[...]
Whether a forums has fewer questions are not, IMO, is not a good reason to
combine them.
I personally disagree on this. Within the OOo-Project there were many
such dead mailinglists, and that just lead to people posting to more
general lists just to reach more people, either leaving out the
dedicated mailinglist completely, or only including it in cc.
And yes, now I did myself come up with but on mailinglists argument :-)
puts head onto pillow ans screams/
Thanks for not forcing me to point out the but on mailinglists ...
