On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 9:01 PM, Matthew Toseland <toad at amphibian.dyndns.org> wrote: > On Wednesday 22 April 2009 21:39:29 Evan Daniel wrote: >> The other obvious use is converting visitors to users :) >> >> I think the best way to do that would be to dramatically improve the >> documentation surrounding what users can do with Freenet. ?I believe >> the biggest turnoff to new users is that the question "why should I >> bother?" is not well answered unless the user has fairly strong ideals >> about privacy. > > That is unfortunately innate in Freenet IMHO. Right now it is very far from > being a fast, secure and reliable means to distribute data. This is not a > problem that marketing will solve, but we need users and funds to solve it.
I don't think I said that well. I believe there is a large gap between the quality of the answer to that question, and the quality of the job the website does of answering that question. Suppose a new potential user has heard about Freenet thanks to seeing it mentioned briefly somewhere, is aware that it has something to do with online privacy and anonymous communication, and thinks that sounds neat. He finds himself at freenetproject.org. What should he click on? The obvious choice is "What is Freenet?" Unfortunately, that says some nice things, but he still doesn't know what he can actually *do*. Certainly some users will be turned off as soon as they realize that Freenet is not their ideal platform for high definition movie downloads while avoiding the MPAA lawyers, but I suspect there is a gap between reading "It acts more like an Internet within an Internet. For example Freenet can be used for: * Publishing websites or 'freesites'" and going "cool, I see how *I* could do that." One approach to solving this problem would be to discuss at length on the mailing list what the project page should look like, and what the documentation should say, and so on. But I think a great many tech-savvy, mildly motivated curious users would be far happier reading a few wiki pages about how to insert a Freenet blog and deciding they could manage to do that themselves before downloading or asking in IRC. Furthermore, I think wikis are common enough that a prominent link that says "Wiki" will capture the majority of that traffic. I would make "Wiki" the second link on the menu on the left after "What is Freenet?" and also have a link from the end of the "What is Freenet?" page that says something like "For more information, see the wiki." So rather than spending a lot of limited dev time trying to improve the website, give tech-savvy and knowledgeable Freenet users a means to incrementally improve the website via the wiki. I personally don't have time to redo the website to be the ideal user-capturing device, nor the expertise, but I suspect the improvements available incrementally from a larger group of users does. But, if the wiki is off in the corner and never gets read by anyone, I really don't see much point in making a couple minor improvements. I suspect I'm not the only one. >> >> That combined with the observation that writing good, up to date >> documentation takes time, and FPI is short on developer time, says to >> me that making the wiki a prominent portion of the web site would be a >> good idea. ?I would count myself as an interested observer and user of >> Freenet, knowledgeable enough to improve the wiki, but not a >> developer. ?I don't have time to do a major overhaul of the wiki >> myself, but I have time to make occasional improvements. ?However, if >> it isn't a form of documentation that is seen as important by the >> developers as a group, then I don't particularly think it's worth my >> time to improve something that most users will never see. ?Leaving the >> wiki in an obscure corner of the website that very few users see is an >> excellent way to ensure that it forever remains out of date and of >> minimal usefulness. > > We probably should link to the wiki, but Ian is in favour of reducing the > number of links to an absolute minimum, and has given some fairly good > reasons for this ... ??? I agree strongly. I don't want to get into a detailed discussion of website redesign, but I think the two ideas are compatible. For example, if the wiki was decent, we wouldn't need a separate documentation link. The wiki is the documentation. The developer link would stay, and things like protocol docs could (possibly) live there instead of the wiki. Conceptually, "What is Freenet?" and "Philosophy" are somewhat redundant (at the high level appropriate to a front-page menubar, anyway). "Papers" should probably go under the developer submenu. "Suggestions" gets turned into a wiki page, and doesn't need a front page link. The same goes for "Tools." The recent news items are already on the main page, so they don't need a menubar link -- an "older news" link at the bottom of the news section on the main page would do just as well. That would cut the number of links from 13 to 8. You could obviously do more or less pruning or something different than I suggested -- that's just what I came up with in five minutes or so. But, I think it's more important to make some modest improvement *now*, with a minimum of wasted dev time, than it is to figure out the perfect thing and then implement it. Having more up to date documentation before the 0.8 release would be a good thing, imo. If that's going to happen, it needs to start well in advance of the release. I don't see any other way to get improved new user documentation before then that has any hope of success at all. I don't know whether emphasizing the wiki more and making a mailing list announcement about it will accomplish that goal, but I believe it has a better chance than any other approach. Evan Daniel
