On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 12:28 PM, Nathan <nathan1...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On 11/23/2010 11:57 AM, plino wrote:
>
>>
>> I do agree that volunteer-friendly user support is the key for the success
>> of
>> any Open Source project.
>>
>> However, in my opinion e-mail and mailing lists are obsolete and
>> ineffective
>> tools.
>>
>> A user forum (with optional mail notification) and a wiki are much more
>> powerful tools.
>>
>> A forum makes it much easier to create a hierarchy of helpers based on
>> merit
>> and on the other hand to handle poorly behaved users.
>>
>> A wiki can be an organized structure of accumulated knowledge.
>>
> i agree, a forum would be more efficient and easier to manage. Out of all
> the open source forum solutions currently out, I would have to say that
> Vanilla forums is the best. Between active development, aesthetically
> appealing, up to date feature sets, it has it all.
>
> http://www.vanillaforums.org


Forums and wikis both have their uses, but a wiki is limited by the keywords
the user knows, its existing content, and its search function, and a forum
is prone to developing long, meandering questions/discussions and lots of
duplicate questions.  As Benjamin demonstrated (accidentally), they're not
ideal for question-and-answer discussions.  He linked to stackoverflow.com,
which is not an open-source platform, but is a great precedent for a support
system.  It integrates the concepts of a blog, wiki, forum, and Digg/Reddit
into one system that seems to work well for asking and getting answers to
questions.

Superuser.com is actually the place to ask questions about the use of
software rather than Stackoverflow, which is for development.
OpenOffice.org actually has 181 questions in their own tag on this site.
There are no questions about LibreOffice yet.  Should we start a new tag for
LibreOffice and maintain a presence there?
--
Kevin Vermeer

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