Hello David,
On 26/08/2020 18:10, David Leangen wrote:
Hello,
I am still trying to get a sense of the community’s vision, and it’s thoughts
relating to how to treat users. Unfortunately I have not heard too many
comments so far on this topic. Trying to read between the lines, I could think
of 4 potential conclusions:
1. People are still on summer holidays and don’t have the time to spend
Everything always slows down on each summer, with holidays and such yes.
2. I have taken a wrong or confusing approach to the topic, so people don’t
know what to answer
Well when people are just saying : "This is not working" without
details, and which James version they use, etc, it is hard to understand
the issue and answer yes. But that is not specific to James I believe,
it is a more global communication problem that you can see for any project.
3. This is already documented somewhere so the assumption is that I already
know it
Not really... We know we have a problem with our current documentation.
Some parts are outdated, there is no versioning so if someone use an
older version of James, it's nearly impossible to find back the
documentation corresponding to it, all information is mixed together.
It is often I can see people asking questions why when they try to use
something it doesn't work, while actually the answer is because they use
the wrong product. But from our current documentation, it's not obvious
and confusing (like for example people trying to use webadmin with the
Spring version of James... where it's not supported).
4. There is not much interest in discussing the the topic of “users”
Why there would be no interest? ^^
To continue with the documentation (at least on the path I have taken so far) I
need to better understand the vision. That will allow me to resolve and clarify
the topics previously raised regarding the community’s approach to dealing with
newbies.
Well I believe a bit like Benoit on this. I think most of the time,
users are asking stuff because, as I raised in point 3, our
documentation is outdated, mixed between different products all
together, not versioned, and very confusing.
With the efforts made on rebranding our products towards a more
understandable user approach and reworking the documentation with
Antora, with a versioning, and having a clear separation between James
flavors, it would already help a lot more the users on how to use James
regarding their needs, and might decrease the overall need for help with
the community.
Also the release process was a bit long and painful as I understood,
thus we were only updating the doc when doing a release, so lots of
fixes stay hanging for a while. I believe with Antora and Eugen work to
automate the build and website release he did (I hope I'm not wrong?),
it might make it much easier as well to keep our documentation up-to-date.
I believe as well trying to add a bunch of how-tos regarding the topics
that an admin might likely be interested to setup with James or what
seems to be recurrent struggles of users might help too.
By the way, this project was much more difficult that I had anticipated. I no
longer have much time to dedicate, but I pledge to continue, albeit at a slower
pace and in the background, so long as I continue to get engagement from the
community members. My main goal is to help document the state of James and the
community, and the secondary goal that I discovered in the process is to point
out gaps and potential areas of improvement. Thanks again for all the support!!
Honestly thank you greatly for all the time and thinking you have been
putting into this new James documentation with a more user-focused
mindset. I believe it helped the project greatly being more community
friendly !
Cheers,
Rene.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: server-dev-unsubscr...@james.apache.org
For additional commands, e-mail: server-dev-h...@james.apache.org
