On 07/02/2008, Michael Loeffler
Don't know why it should be a "complete failure" but in regards of Documentation and the different channels of communication it gives IMO an easy access for newbies. If needed we might list the manuals first and not as now as third thing.
Well if you insist. We have had no evidence of a single person finding the IRC channel via the help link on the desktop. I have been regularly asking a number of those who have joined the channel and seem less familiar with IRC whether they came via help.opensuse.org. I have not yet had anyone who say they have. Nor have we seen a great increase in people in the channel since 10.3. Of the interactive support methods mentioned on help.opensuse.org IRC has the lowest barrier to entry, no registration or subscription required. As for why this is I wouldn't like to say without some figures. Hypothesis 1 - People don't notice the icon on the desktop, or don't think it's important. This can only be confirmed or contradicted by study or feedback. Some of the reviews of 10.3 criticised us for having too many icons on the desktop, perhaps users are not seeing it amid the others. Hypothesis 2 - People do investigate the icon on the desktop but get lost somewhere between help.opensuse.org and IRC/Forum/List. This could be supported by a large number of hits on help.opensuse.org, which I expect someone could provide statistics on. If I were to guess I would go with this one, due to the design of h.o.o it is 3 clicks from the desktop to connect to IRC. Furthermore the help options are fairly small on the left, and even on the IRC page itself the connect link isn't immediately obvious as it is just a normal textual link and there are 7 others on that page. Most of these issues were caused by the shoehorning of help.opensuse.org into the *.o.o website template. Originally it was intended to be a very simple design similar to the susegreeter, but started on demand rather than automatically. It was decided to develop as a static website rather than a Qt app so as to make it easier to develop/modify/translate while not being strictly tied to the distribution release cycle. This then led to having to comply with the website design intended for the real websites which was not really suited to the help.opensuse.org concept. However, without more data we can't really make a conclusion. We can certainly do things differently if we know at what stage the process is failing. For example we can have rich content embedded into the desktop itself more easily with KDE4 & plasma. -- Benjamin Weber -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org