[Owncloud] ownCloud Mailing List for developers

[Jan-Christoph Borchardt]

That becomes pretty evident when you visit the forum and check the
reply counts to threads. There are lots of threads, but most of them
are not replied to. There is even a subforum for issues & feature
requests, with which people are lead the completely wrong way:
http://forum.owncloud.org/viewforum.php?f=4

I cut off Shapado back then because it was yet-another-help-platform.
It’s unfortunate, because questions were actually answered there and
didn’t get buried because you could vote on the thread. The existence
of the forum thinned out questions though.

Let’s talk about this in Berlin.


On Wed, Aug 29, 2012 at 1:31 PM, Bernhard Posselt <nukeawhale at gmail.com> wrote:
> Well, I didnt know that the forum was not used that much. Then we should
> remove it as soon as possible to prevent user dissatisfaction. Maybe
> making it read only?
>
> Where is the shapdo link and is it still being run?
>
> On 08/29/2012 10:25 PM, Jan-Christoph Borchardt wrote:
>> Short wrap-up:
>>
>>
>> Mailing list:
>> There is no problem with having a second list explicitly labeled »for
>> developers«. Everyone can decide what they want to read, just like on
>> IRC. Let’s not start to bikeshed about mailing lists vs. forums – it’s
>> pretty clear we’ll continue to use a mailing list.
>>
>>
>> Help platform:
>> Forums are a pain, even for non-developers. Topics come up time and
>> time again because old ones simply get buried. The forum currently
>> seems more of a heatsink for user questions, which is a shame.
>> We tried http://shapado.com (open source, with voting similar to
>> StackExchange) which went pretty well, Robin and me were answering
>> more technical questions. Then someone opened the forum.
>> There already was a sprawl of help platforms. The in-app help is still
>> there, alluding that you can get help there. On
>> http://apps.owncloud.com/kb there are only very few answered questions
>> during the sample of last month – it’s very detrimental to user
>> experience to offer them »Help« and then not attend to it, hence we
>> should remove the function from the app.
>> I pleaded multiple times to only offer _one_ platform for user
>> support. I don’t even care anymore if it’s proprietary, probably we
>> should just use GetSatisfaction or StackExchange. But we have to make
>> a decision.
>>
>>
>> Community manager:
>> Last year I tried to do that as my time permitted. Looking for open
>> questions, issues, pull requests; running Twitter, Identi.ca,
>> Diaspora, answering to questions and informing people. This is a bunch
>> of work and should have one specialized person on it full-time, so
>> that developers and designers can focus on their stuff.
>> Meanwhile, Klaas’ suggestion that we all should be attentive of user
>> issues is very important.
>
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