Hi Drew,
Drew wrote:
Howdy folks,
I would like to take this opportunity to announce a feature at the User
Community Forum that may be of interest to the folks on this list.
The 'Paid Support' forum.
What is it?
Simply put it is a segregated area where users can ask for services that they
are willing to pay for.
Why is it there?
To address a situation that would come up from time to time at OOoForum and to do so in such a way as to keep it out of the volunteer based support forums. When this would happen at OOoForum it could cause some rather awkward situations
- from the stand point of the person looking to acquire the service, not wanting to insult those that are offering their help for free.
- for those willing to offer their services not wanting to look like a troll.
Yet the fact remained that these where legitimate needs by the user community.
How will the paid support forum work and what it is not?
Well, first it is not intended to replace the Consultants Listing!
- The forum contains a sub-forum 'Consultants Listing' linked to the
consultants page and is the first thing displayed to a user entering that forum.
It is not a place for advertisements either - the idea is that folks looking
for services would ask for offers. A job request board if you will.
It is not a full blown business exchange service, ala rentacoder.com - this is
just a bulletin board.
It simply offers a place for a requester to be contacted by suppliers without having to put their email address out to the world.
This is accomplished in one of two ways
- A requester could select to only receive messages directly on the Board via the Private Message feature.
- More likely, they will list an email link. You send an email to a member via a web form at the site, the email is sent to the member from the forum administrative email account and your return address is included in the body of the email. The service requester decides then whether to contact you directly or not.
There are two ways to monitor the request forum.
First - if you register with the forum you can subscribe to a forum(s). You will find an option for this at the bottom of a forum main index page. Once subscribed an email notification will be sent to your registered email address each time a new posting is made to that forum, included in this email will be the subject line of the post and a link back to the post.
Second - an RSS/Atom syndication script is under development for the forum that will allow you to have a configurable feed for new posts. Currently an alpha release of the syndication script ( have a few open issues on it ) is in place. I hope to have it ready for general use by middle of next month.
This is something new and how much activity it will generate is anyones guess.
Currently there are only two requests on the board, one for a database
development and one for OpenOffice.org training.
I would be very interested in any ideas or suggestions from those here.
In the FR project, I have set up a job@ list ([EMAIL PROTECTED]),
where people searching for developments or support and wanting to pay
for it can post. I must say that there is very very little traffic on
this list. May be it will be more visible on a forum, I don't know. But
I agree with you that this is something needed from time to time.
Kind regards
Sophie
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