On Tue, 2009-07-28 at 04:50 -0700, snowweb wrote:
> Jari Fredriksson wrote:
> > What kind of a forum do you see?
> >
> > I use this as an email list, straight from my email application. I don't
> > use Nabble or Google Groups (whatever those might be..).
> >
> > Quite convenient. Just subscribe and enjoy.
ACK.
> I'm trying to view these threads online, it's obvious that this is more
Completely wrong approach. Find a decent MUA, subscribe the ML as such
and enjoy it.
If you don't know a MUA yet, start with "thunderbird".
> orientated to mailing list users, buy the two minutes effort that they spent
> building the online 'forum' type interface. I notice that when you compare
So you probably get the worst of both worlds - completely unreadable web
pages and an awful user interface for answers. BTW I don't think that
some PHP/CGI-scripts (with or without JavaScript) can solve the inherent
problems of web pages.
See above under "Find a ...".
> the install base of SpamAssassin which must be in the hundreds of thousands
> or more, with the number of support requests being added to this mailing
> list, it is clear that most requiring support are intimidated by this alien
> way of providing it.
Or they just read documentation, try something out, read the source and
generally get some understanding of the *problem* before trying to make
the own problem the problem of others.
> Out of all those people only eight needed support so far today! That's
> unbelievable. Somethings wrong here; Very wrong.
Or something is very very right and correct[0] (as opposed to most of
the commercial and proprietary world as you just implicitly confirmed).
BTW you are also completely ignoring the target audience of SpamAssassin
as such - it is IMHO probably *not* the Joe Plumbers out there (but more
the admin-like types - and they tend to have a significantly different
approach and way of solving problems).
And you ignore completely the motivation of people giving support - see
further down for more.
> Most of the internet community is used to obtaining support from forums, not
Only the Joe Plumbers which - obviously - do not learn to use a MUA.
I saw lots of forums "referenced" by Google and none was even remotely
readable as the average MUA with (sane) threading support.
Let alone that most people throw there problems out and never got an
answer.
> mailing lists. Take my control panel provider "DirectAdmin". They have a far
> smaller install base, supplying software which is significantly more
> intuitive than SA, but they have 413 users currently online on their support
> forum and have therefore probably had thousands of support requests today
> alone. Can you see what I'm driving at?
Feel free to start and run such a beast if you feel like it.
> I understand that you guys like to work this way and you enjoy what you are
> doing, but unfortunately your great skills are being underexposed because of
Is it? Why exactly?
> the lack of a proper forum.
Please proof that the missing "proper forum" - whatever that might be in
detail - is the reason for underexposition.
> If the forum is done right, it should be able to provide you and the others
> with the same features you currently enjoy (ie. the ability to receive
> requests and respond by email) while at the same time, catering for the
> needs of those (who seem to be the majority), who prefer to work via http.
Then proof us (or at least /me who happens to read/glance dozens of
MLs[1] - and some *are* quite high volume) wrong and feel free to start
such a beast and run it for at least a year or so if you feel like it.
> I wouldn't have interrupted you nice community with this issue, but
> unfortunately, when I search for spamassassin support forums online, this is
> about the best I can come up with (which I don't think is serving the
> majority of the SpamAssassin users... the numbers just don't add up).
Please proof that. Thank you.
And since people are here not paid (TTBOMK), it is up to these people to
decide who to help and how to help.
Bernd
[0]: Think about it: If I have an *intuitive* user interface, why do I
need documentation at all?
So IMHO a large bookshelf of books about (so-called) "user-friendly
software" is just a sign of bad user interface design.
[1]: And no, replacing *one* tool - the MUA - for dozens of MLs with
dozens of different forums - each software with a different user
interface, design[1], bugs, quirks and other inconveniences - is
really not an option.
[2]: "text/plain" is the optimal MIME-tyoe. HTML-Mails are in my
experience also unreadable in almost all cases.
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