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

[Maât]

Le 04/10/2010 10:22, Tux99 a écrit :
> Quote: maat-ml wrote on Mon, 04 October 2010 09:42
>   
>> You can not force people to communicate without their assent :)
>>     
> Maat this is unrational fear, that probably originates from the Mandriva
> past. You cannot run a pure community distro like a distro run by a
> commercial company, where paid developers (with the help of volunteer
> devs) do their job and then throw it out there for the 'wild hordes' to
> consume.
>   
Nope. This is just common sense.

Mageia is thought to remain user friendly and potentially desktop oriented
even if there is a raising demand of Mageia for servers.

So we WILL have newbies and we need to take care that they are properly
welcomed.

Debian would have to face the very same problem if they decided to
target new linux users
and non technical users. We are not a new Debian... even if we there are
many domains in which
we have things to learn from them :)

Developers can live without users because they are their own users :)
The contrary is not true...

> A commercial distro attracts the kind of users who just want to be served a
> good product and if they are not happy about it they come complain.
> I perfectly understand why devs want to hide from those kinds of users.
>
>   
We will have still newbies and people that see themselves as customers
even if what they get is free (as in freedom AND and in free beer)

The basic uneducated end-user often feels he's got the right to require
something that "just work"... and often tries to enforce hes view to people
with rude words... that understandable...

...and that quite normal that a developper/packager feels that difficult
to endure :)

> But a pure community distro attracts a different kind of user, users of
> community distros know they are not owed anything, that they are "in debt"
> with the devs and therefore the users behave differently. You can see that
> if you look at other pure community FOSS projects.
>
>   
Perhaps that will be true in the veeeery long run. for the coming year
and the next
and the next... that's completely false imho :)
> If the official forums has clear rules and well organised subforums as I'm
> sure it will be, then users won't invade the ML (or the ML gw forums)
> simply because the rules will say that the dev ML is for developer talk
> only, while support questions need to go into the support subforums.
>
>   
Moderators and Support team will have to face many other problems.

The beginning of a forum makes those people quite busy with forum
user "basic" education (post a new topic for a new subject for example).

These basic rules take time before people abide by them...

More complex rules are a far bigger challenge...

> Of course there will always be the odd user that misbehaves, but there will
> also be mods who will educate and worst case restrict users that don't
> behave.
> The main point though is, when the users is aware that all the devs are
> volunteers, then there is a lot more respect for them.
>
> XBMC is for example a FOSS project that has the developer subforums on the
> main user forum and from my experience this is respected by the users.
> see here: http://forum.xbmc.org/
>
>   
I also comes from a projet which had been using fudforum as a full
symmetric gateway for several lists (users, devs).

People answering existing topics for a new subject force moderators to
split them

Hence the thread is broken on the mailing list (and no way to change
back thread id on a mailing list)

=> devs and advanced users angry

And if moderators don't split the thread people on forums are lost (and
people on the list are angry also)

People answering on the lists using an existing thread for a new subject
make devs angry also

And on forums moderators need to split the topics...

But at each new answer on the old thread the posts goes to the old topic...
so moderators need to split-then-merge for each new message !

On a tiny forum with few activity mailing lists that can be bearable...
when it comes to bigger forum and active lists the number of cases that
moderators will have to deal with manually will make this unlivable.

You can trust me underestimating the problems with this
mutli-communities-communication problem would bring more harm than good.

But as i said to Frederic there is here a real need that we need to
answer to properly :)

All the best,
Maât