First, the users who bothered to write something. This is probably of interest. The longest remark is probably the most interesting. I've tried to categorize them.
"I prefered the old Freenet of a couple of years ago... more interesting content" CONTENT "Search page at the top of the initial webpage" SEARCH "Make this clearer." [ "I didn't get how to use it" ] ??? "Faster, and easier to add information to it." SLOW! INSERT TOOLS "Your installer causes XP to restart Isass.exe" WTF? "Write in Dutch, the difficult things are in English" L10N: DUTCH "Easier connect" (It slowed down my computer) WTF? Maybe he's referring to the slowdown? "not enough information for new computer users" (I Found It Too Complicated) DOCS "Gotta improve speeds in order for it to be useful" SLOW! "I love your philosophy, but unfortunately the system is unnecessarily clumsy and slow. The need to use plug-ins for everything is a hassle, and the peer to peer file sharing is initially very slow. I will most likely try this system again soon, but hope to see it become more user-friendly in future." SLOW! BUNDLE!! "thought it was something like tor, particularly the hidden services, but i found it much more uncategorized, chaotic, slow, and ... dead. Yes, empty. Good idea though." SLOW CONTENT My conclusions: SLOW! - Bootstrapping is hideously slow right now, taking between 5 and 10 minutes to get 10 peers. We need to fix this! CONTENT - We need more content. I don't know what we can do about this though, except for improving everything else in the hope of getting more users. Having said that, IMHO this is in part code for tools/bundle. Most new users probably won't find FMS, Thaw, etc, see DOCS/TOOLS/BUNDLE. SEARCH - We need a search form on the homepage. This requires doing some work on the XMLSpider and inserting its results, it requires some work on XMLLibrarian, and it requires some anonymous person to maintain an index. DOCS/TOOLS/BUNDLE - IMHO these are all more or less the same thing. Users don't know what to do with Freenet. They see it as dead because there are no recent forum posts - in fact there are no forums. On the web there are ALWAYS discussion forums - and an easy way to evaluate whether a site is alive or not is how recent the last post was. Most users won't install FMS, because 1) we should do it for them, and 2) it's a major PITA, involving setting up a news reader and using a web interface as well, and so on. As one user posted: "unnecessarily clumsy and slow. The need to use plug-ins for everything is a hassle," IMHO our decision to not bundle any useful app with Freenet was a major mistake and has significantly reduced Freenet's end-user appeal and usability, in the hope that some Killer App will get some publicity and bundle Freenet. Well, no killer app has had any publicity, and no killer app bundles Freenet on its web page - in fact, our best Killer App at the moment doesn't even have a web page. How many of our apps have web pages? Frost? Does any other killer app have an independant web presence? Having said that, bundling does have some serious problems. A partial solution would be to bundle an officially supported, officially code reviewed, web-based forums plugin. batosai has helpfully written us the Web of Trust plugin, which is in our official SVN and plugins list and therefore is code reviewed, and saces is currently working on an FMS clone using it, although the code for that is only available via hg-over-Freenet at the moment. It should be relatively easy once saces has finished to write a web interface for it, which could then be embedded within Freesites, made available on the menu etc etc. IMHO this is essential for us to be taken seriously by people used to social networking sites, slashdot, and the web at large. However, some tools do need to be external: Thaw needs to be external, and jSite is external although maybe a web based user friendly insert tool could be developed. In any case we will need some external apps. So how do we raise awareness of these, so that users will know how to install them when they need them? IMHO these are two different categories: jSite will be needed by the minority of users who are able to construct web pages by themselves using Frontpage etc, but Thaw will be needed by any user interested in filesharing i.e. almost any user. Perhaps we need an extra stage in the wizard asking the user which of the tools they want, and downloading executable installers for them from Freenet? -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: not available URL: <https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/devl/attachments/20080827/affb6b96/attachment.pgp>
