Hi Michael, *,

On Mon, Jan 10, 2011 at 10:36 AM, Michael Wheatland
<mich...@wheatland.com.au> wrote:
>
> Your average end user
> will likely never search through mailing list threads,

The average end user will not search web-forums either.

My personal experience with forums is that they are useless for
technical, more complex questions, as most of the times it is clueless
people giving advice to other clueless people. Unless you're looking
for something obvious, most of the time a thread just lingers around
unanswered at all, or the one with the problem writes something like
"Oh, solved my problem, can be closed" and never bothered to state how
that person actually solved the problem. Or they are full of useless
suggestions that are not even covering the topic.
Again, my typical searches may be more "challenging" than those from
the average user, but I just hate all the noise that is in forums. I
only use one forum - for a well-seperated hobby. But those forums are
dedicated and exceptional in its quality (mainly to the few users it
has) - I used another one, but as the product is covered ran out of
production, it is idling along.
But I never use forums for software to to the lack of quality of the
answers therein.

> If we did provide a user forum, which I believe we should, using a
> dedicated forum system will provide far more functionality and
> usability,

That's what I've been saying from the very start..

> What do others think? Is the forum support option important for trust
> building and familiarity? What system would we use?

The ones that already exist. I absolutely don't see a reason for
creating yet another one. I think people agree on that one at least.

(and to avoid confusion: No, I don't consider nabble as a forum. Why I
personally don't like its's interface, I have no problem with
integrating it to the site as it seems technically easy to do)

ciao
Christian

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