14 Oct
2013
14 Oct
'13
10:24 p.m.
On Oct 14, 2013, at 9:53 PM, Jeremie BOUSQUET <jeremie.bousquet(a)gmail.com> wrote:
This is what stackoverflow does (and several other forums I've seen) and it seems to
work quite well. Finding questions/answers is a different topic from what I meant here.
Search usually works quite well to find existing topics IMO.
This is used on a lots of forum apps that exist. The reporter should of course be allowed
to say whether his question has been answered to. And the system could also allow
committers/some contributors to close topics too by providing a reason to close it.
For me qa is different, and better be faq (possibly extracted from the list
though it's difficult).
For sure, if you add "reply" to the archive I work on, you're not far from
a forum app. And you can "build" on it by adding nice features. But one
should not forget that it's built on a mailing-list, and people only
dealing with the "raw" emails should not get lost in the process (thinking
here of all non standard formatting tags some UIs like to add in emails
text... If you want formatting in emails, do HTML....).
Your email client is a good example of a faulty email client that wrongly replies to mails
;) (your answers are mixed with the text it's replying to)...
Le 14 oct. 2013 20:58, "Vincent Massol"
<vincent(a)massol.net> a écrit :
registered
Posting without being registered could be an issue, unless you require an
email address, a captcha or both. It's then already more complex than
sending a (crappy) email from your phone ;)
Most people find it too complex to register to a mailing list. Sending the email is ok
once you're registered.
What I mean is indeed to make it easy for a first time user to find how to post a
question. And yes the registration could be done seamlessly by providing an email
address/name and once the user has clicked submit send him an email that he needs to reply
to to validate his question for example (to ensure the email is valid). Something seamless
like this.
On Oct 14, 2013, at 6:56 PM, Eduard Moraru <enygma2002(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 14, 2013 at 6:53 PM, Vincent Massol <vincent(a)massol.net>
wrote:
>
>>
>> On Oct 10, 2013, at 2:55 PM, Hamster <teunham(a)hotmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> vmassol wrote
>>>> Can you explain what you mean exactly? :)
>>>
>>> Why don't "we" open a "XWiki Site" and start posting
all our questions
>>> there?
>>>
>>> Nothing ventured, nothing gained…
>>
>> Because as it's mentioned, it's not easy. People will vote in Area51
and
>> only the most requested will be open.
>>
>
> Yes, but sleeping in a burrow does not improve our chances of getting
more
> visibility of the project, does it? Neither
does creating our own new
> underground establishment. If we plan on moving or doing anything in
this
direction, maybe the "forest" is where the action happens :)
I see 3 main reasons to move away from a mailing list for the users list:
1) Make it extra easy for users to post a question without being 2) Provide
visibility for those who answer questions (i.e. earn points
and rankings) and as a
consequence especially who are the experts
That is tough, not the implementation, but the way to make it meaningful
and not frustrating... Some answers can be complex and require time to
find, though in general they have the same weight than the "copy paste
link" answer ( very good also, but less demanding). I find that systems
that allow identifying the "best answer" are more useful. 3) Allow
closing topics to know which one do not have a satisfactory
answer so that people
who wish to help know which threads they can help on
Not so easy either, who's in charge ? (If the requester forgot to put
"solved" in subject)... That could be large extra-work, to have this be
meaningful. All those are great, but based on my (intranet and
limited) experience,
nothing is more easy than sending a mail.
Yes, sending an email is easy. Registering to a mailing list isn't. And searching for
message isn't either since you need to find an archiving tool.
Also even though sending an email is easy, replying to an existing thread isn't if you
don't have the email locally to reply to. So if you're just a occasional user you
don't want to receive all emails from everyone but you'd like to be able to reply
to a thread from time to time. And you can't do that on a list.
And the added-value of those
features is useless if people do not use them, which you cannot force them
to do.
(Ot : closing topics requires some thinking, many different possibilities
exist)
Forums are close and great, but somehow they are different and usually
require more moderation activity. There are also a bunch of nearly empty
unmoderated zombie forums on internet…
Why would they require more moderation than a mailing list? They require maintenance if
you wish to do better than a mailing list simply because mailing lists don't offer
those features! But if you do want these features then there's no choice anyway since
ML don't offer them.
"There are also a bunch of nearly empty unmoderated zombie forums on internet"…
the same thing can be said for a lot of mailing lists ;)
That being said I struggled against mailing lists at
my office, seeing them
as the most archaic way of sharing. But at the same time, they proved to
work far better than the more sophisticated solutions... I can't really
compare, different targets.
As a dev, I also like mailing list which is why in the previous thread on this topic, I
mentioned that the best of both world would be a forum app that bridges with mailing list,
if you can solve the issue of seamlessly sending to the list on behalf of the user (not so
easy as proved by Nabble which is too complex and a lot of users don't understand why
their nabble topics don't make it to the xwiki lists and why they don't get
answers)...
IMO those are
our main 3 use cases.
Then we can evaluate the options we have to fill those use cases:
A) Try to get a site on area51
B) Install a stackoverflow clone in our infrastructure (see
http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/2267/stack-overflow-clones)
C) Develop a solution based on XWiki
D) Other
I don't like A) because the chances to get it is about 0.1% and even more
important I strongly dislike the way they manage stackoverflow (I'm not
able to provide answers to questions because at one point in the past I
answered a question by sending a user to a URL that gave the exact answer
to his question)… As a result this prevented me about 4-5 times from
answering a question for which I knew the answer… There's also the question
of not owning our own data.
C) is a lot of work but it could be possible because Jeremie is working
on a use
case relatively close to it. And the "eat our dog food" is quite
nice and we can learn stuff in the process. XWiki fits nicely with the use
case of a "Q&A site" IMO. It should be relatively easy to start with a
simple QA app and progressively enhance it.
For the mail archive, I have more time to work on it
these days... But
remaining work is quite big.
Cool!
Food for thoughts:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1576935/open-source-alternative-to-userv…
Since one of XWiki's main use case is knowledge base, I still find it logical that we
could expand on that to create a Q&A solution. Whether the store is in a mailing list
system, inside XWiki's DB itself or even in JIRA is an open question...
On a related topic (old now), see http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Design/HelpDesk
Thanks
-Vincent
The
"easiest" is probably B). For fun I'm trying
http://bitnami.com/stack/osqa locally.
>
> Thanks
> -Vincent