[Mageia-discuss] Mailing List to Web Forum Bidirectional Gateway

[Maât]

Le 04/10/2010 10:24, Frédéric CUIF a écrit :
> Le lundi 4 octobre 2010 09:42:02, Maât a écrit :
>   
>> You can not force people to communicate without their assent :) 
>>     
> Yes, I know that my sentence sounds irrealistic or like a fairy tale... 
> But I think we should discuss about what could change in our behaviours. Why couldn' we think about adapting the way of treating information ? That's juste what i'm saying, and you might have noticed that I'm not working in computers ;) 
> Please, take into account that's only y point of view, and that my bad english makes me write my sentences not exactly as I would like to explain them :)
>   
Sorry Fred i did not make my point clear :-(

Your goal is something that i target too. Communication between end
users and devs IS definetely something we want to exist.

But we need to take into the debate what the various people want or
reject to make something viable on the long run.

The base of my point is this :

1) Developers and packagers dont want to :
-- be harrassed
-- or to support stupid questions (think RTFM, STFW...)
-- or see useless topics (like "yey all see my new shiny pink desktop
theme \o/")

1.1) But they are always ready to :
-- hear clever suggestions about missing cool feature or possible
improvement
-- and (of course) hear about real bugs

2) Basic users want to:
-- have their problems adressed... wether by (upstream or not) devs or
packagers or support teams they don't care :)
-- provide feedback with the sureness that it will be taken into account

2.2) they dont want to:
-- be blackballed by grunting dev / packager
-- have their requests or feedback trashed

So the inescapable conclusion is that we cannot avoid to think a kind of
"permeable membrane" between the two communities that will :

-- protect devs and packagers from useless topics or inconsequential
chatter from end users
-- allow subjects which deserve special attention to pass through
(whether bugs or cool suggestions) and keep people linked on this
particular subject

So the bridge must not be systematic (or at least not systematically
symmetric) and managed by human beings able to make the difference
between subjects that will be worth the dev/packagers invested time...

We could give moderators and forum support team the ability to click on
a particular subject to create this special link. the simplest way is
something like an alert sent to devs/packageds lists to catch their
eye... the more complex way could be to allow devs/packagers to reply
using the mailing list so that their answers appear on the forum.

This would make (imho) devs more comfortable with user interaction and
forums and in the same time make end user happy to have complex problems
taken care of by brilliant people.

And i'm pretty sure that forcing all to pass from a forum to a list
would make devs escape from the linked list.

The other way (systematic forward of lists to forums would bring volume
and performances issues on the long run with the consequence of a poor
user experience on the forums)

Hope i made it clearer this time :)

Maât