"Automatic Info Reporting" BoF summary

[Ingo Klöcker]

On Saturday 27 September 2014 23:21:52 Mario Fux wrote:
> Am Samstag, 27. September 2014, 22.05:03 schrieb Thomas Lübking:
> > > That's just my humble opinion but honestly I think contact
> > > information to our
> > > users is much more valueable than any other data.
> > 
> > I guess they'll have a similar opinion - and therefore be rather
> > reluctant to give it away (to not be spammed by KDE or have their
> > contact data in one more database to be leaked from) - or they give
> > you "me at mail.com" (poor fellow who actually has this addy ;-)
> 
> That's the pessimistic view. I (and yes, my personal opinion ;-) only
> want the email address of the people that are interested in what
> we're doing and about news of the software they use. For a lot of
> people there is no such possibility atm. There are the people that
> are really interested in free software and some of the technical
> stuff behind it and they have mailing lists, the forum, the dot etc.
> but I think there are people that "just" want to use our great
> software (ok, the great software you guys make, I'm not coding much
> atm ;-) and want to know if there are new versions, new features etc.

A lot of software that I use does already do this via its automatic 
update reminder. None of this software needs my email address for this.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 (I haven't use newer versions) has a pane 
in the UI which displays news.

At the same time none of this software has ever asked me for my email 
address.

Showing the user the news about the program when he's using the program 
(e.g. when he starts it) feels much more natural to me and I claim that 
the user will be much more receptive to this news than to news received 
via mail. I receive so many news mails that any news received per mail 
has a high possibiliy of drowning in the other news.

To sum up, I think there are much better ways than email to keep 
interested users of a program informed about "new versions, new 
features, etc." of this program.


Regards,
Ingo
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