hmmm, seems this is a sensitive area.
Well, I certainly never meant to imply that the list should go away!
For Heaven's Sake -- No! As an on-going integrated knowledge base it is
possibly *the* most important user resource that Revolution has going for it
and vies with the documentation itself as a mission critical for new people.
once a newbie realizes he can access tools to search the lists, it's
a big time gateway to not re-inventing the wheel and feeling
confident that "Yes, i can do it, just look at these resources!"
Vs saying "Oh gosh, this is so far over my head... forget it..."
Also, to be more accurate, the forums at Expert's Exchange are separate
by virtue of being separate disciplines. The discussion about
Apache web admin has nothing to do with the discussion about CSS.
But within the field of CSS we don't have different forums: like
one forum for CSS Design and one forum for CSS Rules and another forum for
Positioning with CSS-- that would be nuts.
For Revolution, one would be hard put to define
any separate "disciplines" that really warranted forums.
Especially at this stage...
Also as one who is an "amateur programmer" despite years of xtalk
I don't consider myself an expert, and I'm not sure that the distinction
between "newbie" and "expert" is a useful one in any framework in terms
of using that distinction to "chop up" the discourse through some
architecture
that puts hard walls between them.
At Expert's Exchange the entire model is just the other way round:
newbies and non-expert's are
in direct relationship with experts in the same "field" of discourse.
To lose this will be a disservice to new people, who are lurkers
for the most part, but will spot key things in the discourse of
professionals that spur them on, give them ideas, hope
solutions etc... even if they never post themselves.
Right now the list is the only place this "silent" interaction can occur
with
such "unfettered" dynamism.
If you cut off newbies from the discourse of expert's, the result
will be that they find it hard to grow and possibly even leave the product.
It would be a major strategic error for any company.
Richard Gaskin wrote:
Sivakatirswami wrote:
Scale: I don't know how many of you are members of Expert's Exchange,
(EE) but with 3 Million + members, the idea of getting a mailing
digests from EE with daily posts by all members is clearly insane. A
forum is
the only option.
Perhaps, but even if the current growth rate was estimated
unrealistically high, it would be a loooooong time before the RunRev
audience reached millions of email list subscribers.
Long before then, the audience who enjoys email discussion forums would
have organically broken into smaller SIGs; we see some of this even now
in the Rev world (see the Links page at RevJournal.com).
As we've seen with the Rev crowd, most communities are organically
self-regulating.
Same with Apple or Adobe. I once joined an Apache mailing list and
was so overwhelmed with posts on the list that I had to ask my question,
got an answer and unsubscribe asap!
Wished it was a forum....now I don't use that list at all, I ask
apache questions at EE... for this very reason.
It's also worth noting that while Apple maintains a web forum for their
casual consumer audience, they also maintain discussion lists for their
developers. Developer needs are more intensive than consumer's.
With Rev's entry-level product now priced way below industry averages at
$49, it would appear in price and design to address a more casual
consumer audience, implying of course a shift away from conversing with
the pro-dev audience which had focused their message while the company
had made only pro tools. How a small company will be able to handle
this broadly disparate messaging schism will be interesting to see as it
plays out, but the current organic result of a list for serious users
and a web forum for more casual users seems consistent with your
observation of highly successful companies like Apple.
We're not there yet with Rev (scale wise) but maybe soon... so the
framework is in place.
We can hope, as a good many of us "old-timers" have been working hard to
help make happen for many years. As it does, however, there would seem
no reason why any forum couldn't be available in both email and web
form. Anything less seems a little odd, a touch behind the times for a
technology vendor.
The current forum is apparently still being set up. For example, unlike
most product forums out there, it's not possible to even read the posts
at the Rev forum until after you've submitted your personal data and
wait to have it human-verified. The readers there have overwhelmingly
favored adhering to traditional convention by at least allowing read
access for guests, so it seems reasonable that'll be set up as the
system gets fleshed out. Adding an email interface would seem almost as
simple to set up as the system moves toward completion.
But even when the email interface is added, it would be incomplete
without also including the knowledge base that this community has
created here over the years. Perhaps the most empowering part of the
Rev community is being able to drop into a search of this list's
archives and know that I can find almost any answer to any topic,
algorithms for every need, valuable code snippets, tips and tricks for
working with the IDE, etc.
If that ever went away the community would lose its most valuable asset.
But rest easy: there are more than half a dozen maintained, and
there's no reason why the addition of any new forum should have any
affect on the knowledge base anyway, so other than earthquake or other
catastrophe the backups will never be needed.
Usage needs: I uses a great tool called "MPEG2 Works 4" for drag and
drop processing of muxed video and export to QT. But I really don't
what to be on a mailing list of video nerds: my needs and interest
are very narrow. Serbian's forum for MPEG2 Works 4 is perfect, I need
help, ask a question, set "watch this to one" get an answer, I'm
notified by email that my question is answered... with a clickable
link back to the forum, to my thread.
True, for the more casual users who would seem to reflect the company's
shift toward consumer products, a dip-in-as-needed forum would be helpful.
But if you make your living with Rev it's really helpful to have all
posts come into your awareness, even if just in the convenient digest
mode. Software pros are busy people; using push rather than
hunt-and-pull keeps a broader range of relevant info flowing past the
eyeballs who need to see it.
The nice thing is that there's no reason the forums should need to be
any sort of either-or proposition. Each is good for its own reasons,
and they make a great "also" for one another.
--
Richard Gaskin
Managing Editor, revJournal
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Om shanti
(In Peace)
Sivakatirswami
www.himalayanacademy.com
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