On Fri, 15 Apr 2011 17:39:02 +0200, Matt Barringer wrote:
On Fri, 15 Apr 2011, Carlos E. R. wrote:
Most people choose forums, that's a fact. If newcommers do not find the help they need to make openSUSE work, they will go to another distro, not to a mail list.
No matter what you say about the goodness of maillists will convince them. That's how things are now. Perhaps in 4 years time the preferred method will be something else yet to be invented, but now and here it is forums.
I understand that's the world we live in, but large omnibus forums are a *terrible* way to interact with users, from a developer standpoint - I simply don't have enough time in the day to monitor a dozen+ sub-forums for threads that are asking questions that I can answer. Is it possible to somehow automatically flag keywords in new topic submissions in the forum? That would be very helpful.
The way I handle this, Matt, is to use NNTP and in my reader, I flag threads (automatically using the scoring system) that I've participated in or that people I want to follow have participated in. I look at subject lines for any other threads. If it looks interesting, I'll read a message or two. If the user can't be bothered to write a helpful subject line, I'm not likely to take the time to figure out what their problem is or if I can help them. There is some onus on the user to be clear in writing a brief description of their problem and using it as a subject line. I make several passes through the forums every day (and have done it this way for years) - it doesn't really take me that long with this particular access method and way of handling it. It's also no different than how I handle e-mail on my personal e-mail account. I get a lot of crap in my inbox (stuff I've arguably asked for), and I note the sender and subject, and if it's not important, I ignore it or even mark it as read. Jim -- Jim Henderson Please keep on-topic replies on the list so everyone benefits -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org