I'll see that we get a sticky posted on the openSUSE forums so those who aren't aware are aware. OK?
That is perhaps excessive :-)
I'm confused....You seem to think it needs to be documented, but now you don't. :)
Which forum would you suggest that be put in? When we announced the last outage, at least one user said the announcement was in "literally the last place he would have looked" (the forum announcements forum, ironically).
The announcement group should be the right place, I think, to tell existing nntp users to make sure they are using the correct server. New users should read the faq and get the correct one first time.
What would you consider to be "the right place"? As I pointed out, we've announced things before where we thought was "the right place" but were taken to task for putting it in the "last place" someone would have thought to look for that information. You see, it seems we're hosed whatever we do - if we announce it in the wrong place, then people say "you put it in a place where I wouldn't look". If we don't, then we get taken to task for not posting it (whether we thought it was relevant or not, as is the case with the Novell forums' NNTP outage). It seems there's no way for us to "win" with this. Wherever we put it, someone's going to say we put it in the wrong place, because it's not where they would look. Indeed, we had put the proper NNTP server info in the FAQ and you've told us that that's the wrong place for it for existing NNTP users. So again, it's feeling like we can't "win" for trying. So I thought I'd ask you - since you're interested in this - where you felt it should go - what the specific "appropriate" place would be. Of course, someone else is very likely to come along and tell us that because we put it someplace *they* wouldn't have thought to go to, we got it wrong even though you will have told us the "proper" place. :)
In this instance, the address change was in the FAQ, but clearly the FAQ is the wrong place for frequently asked questions (?), because you hadn't been up there to note that the address had changed.
Actually, I had. But perhaps you don't remember that once I asked if I should migrate, and the answer, AFAIR, was no, no need.
Sure, it wasn't necessary, but that doesn't mean that when the Novell forums' interface is taken down that users of the non-Novell groups are going to see the announcements. I myself use both servers, with separate profiles in Pan, for the various groups. But given that you had noted that the address changed, I would have assumed/expected that you would have checked the openSUSE groups on the openSUSE server upon encountering a problem with the openSUSE groups on the Novell server.
Remember that switching nntp servers is a pain, because often it means that posts get reloaded, and the client forgets which posts were read, which replied to, etc. It is a royal pain.
Using leafnode as intermediate it has been less of a pain, but I have perhaps hundreds of duplicate mails, all have not been detected.
It can be, but a good newsreader and/or server should be able to handle duplicates appropriately, by not only using the high message indicator but also by determining if a message is a duplicate by using the Message ID (which is going to be the same regardless of what server it comes through).
If we post it via NNTP in a forum, then it'll be clearly visible for about 3 weeks, but as it ages, it'll fall further and further down the active threads list, until NNTP clients don't even pick it up because the messages' age is too old.
So....where do you suggest we make such an announcement where we know that everyone will see it so we don't have to go through this again in 3 months? :)
It should not happen :-)
Outages happen. That's the nature of IT. But you're avoiding my question of where *specifically* such an announcement should be put so as to reach everyone who needs to see it. We updated the address in the FAQ, but that apparently wasn't sufficient. So now if we post somewhere that those using NNTP should use forums.opensuse.org, how do we avoid the problem of another NNTP user (perhaps who has been away for 6 months) coming back in another 3 months and encountering a problem because they didn't see the notice that they should update their configuration to point to forums.opensuse.org? Or do we just wait for that to happen and then have this exact same discussion with them, with the addendum that we posted a message in a newsgroup that you specified (since he ran into this issue and we asked for your input), only to have that person tell us that we put it in "the last place they would look"?
It is enough to tell once to migrate. And perhaps add in the faq "not to use the other server".
The FAQ was changed, but when a change is done people that read it before remember what it said; thus we have to be told to forget the old info and switch servers; that's the missing info in the faq.
But if we put that in the FAQ, you've already said that you didn't go back and read the FAQ after it changed. So I'm asking you *specifically* where you think we should tell people about this so they won't miss it, regardless of when the last time they read the FAQ was or the last time they accessed the forums via NNTP was. I'd like your help in identifying "the appropriate place" so we can avoid having this discussion with someone else in a few months, because clearly when we've tried to notify users in the past, we've not done as good of a job as those users would have done themselves....So I figure it makes sense to ask one of these users who thinks they know the best way to handle this. :) Jim -- Jim Henderson Please keep on-topic replies on the list so everyone benefits -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org