Bryen, I do have all the respect for you and for every contributor on this project. If someone who is placing work on helping with our goals has chosen «RTFM», my role would be making «RTFM» look good and promote it with the right message. With this I can help. With the rest, I don't believe if I want. You want that stuff that way... sure, if the documentation team does want me to work on RTFM, I will still help them and will my best so it happens that way. I've already mailed Jurgen about it showing my full support and I will make it happen. I rest my case. Good luck with the guru's. I'm the newbie here. nelson On Mon, 2010-10-25 at 19:33 -0400, Bryen M Yunashko wrote:

On Mon, 2010-10-25 at 19:00 +0100, Nelson Marques wrote:

...

On Mon, 2010-10-25 at 08:39 -0500, Paul Cutler wrote:

...

Hi,

<snip>

...

But I can't communicate enough how disappointed I am in the sub-domain that has been chosen: http;//rtfm.opensuse.org - RTFM has such a negative connotation, especially from Linux's early years, that while this may be funny to an old-timer that has been using Linux for more than 10 years, to someone who is new and needs help, this is a bad message to send. Whether they have tried to get help on IRC or a forum and have been told to go "RTFM" we shouldn't encourage that kind of behavior by naming a sub-domain "RTFM".

Allow me:

1. RTFM provides high notoriety! This can be explored. It is the job of Marketing to make sure that the right message is passed to users. So, if no one cares about providing the users the reasons why 'RTFM' was selected, then it might fail, otherwise, it might actually be a success.

2. Many people that I know were actually self-learners through documentation, in a way, they used the 'RTFM' process to learn. How can this be negative?

3. RTFM is a sort of (urban?) 'geeky myth' and has strong roots in the community and even outside. I've never seen no one bashing down the RTFM method, instead I've seen many people preaching about it. So it can't be that negative.

4. The process (of building and servicing documentation) is where we actually should place energy, not the name, though the name does actually fit in the means of the project.

5. Can you provide a study that actually can support the claim that 'RTFM' is actually 'negative' and such case, negative in each way?

6. I find more dangerous to change the name and kill the motivation of the people working for it (which we should support in the first place), than exactly keeping RTFM.

Like Bryen said... openSUSE is a caring community and very democratic (unlike other projects), therefore, the best way would be to take this to openFATE. But once more I want to make clear that changing the name might kill motivation for the people who are actually giving their time and commitment to make this happen.

I know there are some people with background to support this, for example with 'Motivation Theories' which are a part of Psychology (maybe Jos) and I would like to ear their thoughts about how harmful this kind of changes can be in a community when it comes to motivation.

I'm pretty sure that Paul and many other people here on the Desktop area (and those around kernel) have heard the term BFS (BRAINFUCK SCHEDULER), which is pretty much more 'harmful' than 'RTFS',

In other words:

* RTFM has enough notoriety to boost this project; * RTFM is a geeky myth known by many; * RTFM does fit in the organizational goals of the project; * RTFM is easy enough to provide a hook for the audience; * RTFM will be connoted with what we want people to do it (else we fail as marketing); * RTFM is a contribution, therefore, we should respect the wishes of the people placing the work on it, as we do to any other contributions.

I would rather see a reason with substance to support a claim that could kill the project on it's very own birth, than just a claim made out of thin air.

nelson

...

Call it docs.opensuse.org, help.opensuse.org, userhelp.opensuse.org or anything else. There's no reason to continue an old stereotype or use an abbreviation in a sub-domain that contains profanity.

If anyone can pass this on to the community members who set this up or share their contact information I'm more than happy to pass on this feedback.

Thanks.

Paul

Nelson,

I agree with a lot of what you have said over time, but unfortunately this time I have to disagree.

A quick background information on Paul Cutler, who also serves on the Board of GNOME Foundation if I"m not mistaken. I first met Paul a year ago in Chicago at the GNOME Foundation Marketing Hackfest and found him to be an extremely knowledgeable person when it comes to marketing. His leadership in that meeting and subsequent insights to his marketing expertise on the mailing list has left me very much impressed and honestly, he's one of my role models when it comes to open source marketing. When he talks about these things, it comes from experience, not conjecture and I would take what he says with complete credibility.

That's not to say he's some kind of god, and we can't disagree with him from time to time. Just that he's not some newbie when it comes to marketing concepts.

That said...

I doubt there's some actual study on the impact of "RTFM" but there's certainly plenty of stories of how people have found RTFM to be offensive. I think it is less so these days than just a few years ago, but the wounds are still kind of fresh for many people.

RTFM conjures a sense of elitism as wwell as an indication to not have a desire to work with newcomers to the table. While FOSS has made great strides, we still suffer from a significant knowledge gap betwen the know's and the know-not's. And there are plenty of studies to prove this.

At the conference this past week, someone was wearing an RTFM t-shirt. My interpreters asked what it meant, and I simply spelled out the acronym to them. They found it insulting and uninviting.

On Friday, we had a GNOME team meeting and one of the points raised was that we, in openSUSE, suffer from not having enough people around to provide personal support to newcomers who are trying to figure out an issue or how to set up their desktop properly. This in turn affects the number of users we have in the GNOME space on openSUSE.

Carrying the RTFM mantra would be completely unsuportive of our needs to grow a good support base and not alienate newcomers with "RTFM" which does have negative connotations and has for many years.

Bryen

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If everyone here can say with a clean conscience that they have no trouble saying the words "read the fucking manual" to anyone and everyone who has a problem which can be solved by the docs then I think rtfm is a great idea. If you think that might cause offence, then maybe you should be looking at ditching the name. Alan. On Tue, Oct 26, 2010 at 5:32 AM, Rajko M. wrote:

On Monday 25 October 2010 16:35:33 Nelson Marques wrote:

...

If someone who is placing work on helping with our goals has chosen «RTFM», my role would be making «RTFM» look good and promote it with the right message.

From your perspective F-word can be fun for non-native speakers, but try to translate RTFM to Portuguese and tell me what is positive in F part of it. It is a profanity. I'm sure that I will not tell to any person that I have respect for, or I expect to be respected from, to see rtfm domain for opensuse docs.

Well entrenched acronyms can be changed, but the price can be higher than openSUSE can pay.

IMO, energy can be better used to fix the links and style sheet glitches on the http://doc.opensuse.org .

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You an refine it whatever way you want, but the canonical meaning is fuck. Fuck is the meaning I know, fuck is the meaning people I work with know. Fuck is the meaning my boss knows. I wouldn't be happy telling my boss to fucking do something. I also wouldn't be happy telling a potential customer to fucking do something. Especially when that customer wants to give me money. If I was knew to a project and one of the core developers was telling me to just fucking do XXX, I'd feel mildly insulted. If you felt vaguely offended or insulted while reading that paragraph then you understand why RTFM is not a good choice. I really don't see what it brings to the table other than 'fuck'. I'd also like to direct your attention to the rather apt section 'Use and overuse' here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTFM . Take note of how other distros and other websites have banned (yes, *banned*) the usages of that phrase as it's both unhelpful and unwelcoming. That's pretty much all I have to add. Alan On Tue, Oct 26, 2010 at 7:35 PM, Nelson Marques wrote:

On Tue, 2010-10-26 at 17:59 +0100, Alan wrote:

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If everyone here can say with a clean conscience that they have no trouble saying the words "read the fucking manual" to anyone and everyone who has a problem which can be solved by the docs then I think rtfm is a great idea.

If you think that might cause offence, then maybe you should be looking at ditching the name.

Read This Fine Manual

Phonetically: redifine manual /* they look so close */

Plus lots of other stuff... Some people will know it's 'Read the fking manual' but we can present in another non-harmful way, and people can still laugh about it.

Given the ammount of self-learning on this communities, I really think it's dangerous and involves a risk to use it, but it work out very good!

But that's just me.

...

Alan.

On Tue, Oct 26, 2010 at 5:32 AM, Rajko M. wrote:

...

On Monday 25 October 2010 16:35:33 Nelson Marques wrote:

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If someone who is placing work on helping with our goals has chosen «RTFM», my role would be making «RTFM» look good and promote it with the right message.

From your perspective F-word can be fun for non-native speakers, but try to translate RTFM to Portuguese and tell me what is positive in F part of it. It is a profanity. I'm sure that I will not tell to any person that I have respect for, or I expect to be respected from, to see rtfm domain for opensuse docs.

Well entrenched acronyms can be changed, but the price can be higher than openSUSE can pay.

IMO, energy can be better used to fix the links and style sheet glitches on the http://doc.opensuse.org .

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We will remove rtfm.o.o now and create additionally an alias docs.opensuse.org, Andreas -- Andreas Jaeger, Program Manager openSUSE, aj@{novell.com,opensuse.org} Twitter: jaegerandi | Identica: jaegerandi SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany GPG fingerprint = 93A3 365E CE47 B889 DF7F FED1 389A 563C C272 A126 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-gnome+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-gnome+help@opensuse.org