Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-project (930 mails)

[Henne Vogelsang <hvogel@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hey,

On 22.06.2010 19:50, Per Jessen wrote:
> Jim Henderson wrote:
>
> > On Tue, 22 Jun 2010 18:44:03 +0200, Jan Engelhardt wrote:
> >
> > > > I don't see that it's necessarily a bad thing, though, to try to
> > > > educate forum users (or users who come in through any venue) in how
> > > > to report
> > > > bugs.  DenverD directs a fair number of people to bugzilla to file
> > > > bugs, and has some success in getting responses back from people
> > > > saying that they have filed a bug.
> > >
> > > As a passer-by, the biggest problem with bugzilla is that it requires
> > > creation of an account. Debian BTS is a lot more non-subscriber
> > > friendly and allows to converse via mail, not needing to specially
> > > open a browser.
> >
> > And actually, forum users also have to create an account - that same
> > account is used for access to bugzilla - so in some ways, the forum
> > users are one step further along in that process because they already
> > have the account to create bugs. :-)
>
> That's perfect - there really should not be anything preventing an
> ml-fora bi-gating then. 

Except the HUGE cultural difference in how people use the medium. A
mailing list is a culture of correctness, RFCs and a certain
communication style. And the people that keep this communication medium
going (the people most important to our project!) are very picky about
it. If you mix this with the more relaxed style of fora you will drive
exactly these people away.

I get that you want to connect the forum community closer to the other
parts but that does not necessarily mean to integrate the communication
medium. I must say I'm always a bit perplexed by this method. We don't
integrate IRC, twitter, facebook or all the other communication media
with each other, but nevertheless they work together. This is mostly due
to people using them being a bit less afraid to change communication
media. So an IRC topic just points to the latest release announcement on
news.o.o, a mailinglist will send people that want a feature to
openfate, if someone complaints about a problem with the distribution on
Twitter he will get pointed to the user to user support on the forum or
mailinglists and so on. I think this is what you guys need to do in the
forum as well. Present the tools that are there, help people overcome
their "fear" to leave the forum. Explain to people that if they want to
connect on a social level to developers they _have_ to go to a
mailinglist, because that’s where the developers choose to mingle, and
how to use this medium. Introduce people to Bugzilla and help them to
file useful bugs which means something else then posting a forum entry
into the tracker. This is how we will connect the forum to other parts
of the project better and make everybody benefit. Simply dropping forum
posts into the mailinglists, or for that matter any other medium, won't
help us.

Henne

-- 
Henne Vogelsang, openSUSE.
Everybody has a plan, until they get hit.
        - Mike Tyson
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