On Fri, Oct 12, 2007 11:33:27 AM +0100, mike scott
([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote:
Mike,
nothing written below is intended as an attack or a critique against
you personally, of course. As far as I remember, you weren't around
the last time I raised these issues. Your message, however, seems to
call for a bit of history, and may be the one that makes things
change. Thanks for it!
> This same topic keeps coming up on the 'users' mail list. Nothing
> can be done there, it seems, and the thought was to raise it
> here......
>
> To be blunt, the 'users' mail list suffers from beginners.
Very well said, but... may the suffering be due also to, how to call
it, suboptimal support? And one cannot help but wonder if this second
reason is one of the those why some of the most active and competent
helpers of a few years ago (not me, of course: Bruce, Jean...) have
stopped answering there.
> This manifests in various ways:
>
> ** The question's been asked many, many times before; the answer
> could be found online with a little effort.
I don't think this one (or the "how to unsubscribe" one) can be
solved. It happens continuously even on lists where only subscribers
can post and the average software competence level is far higher than
that of the average OOO newbie.
> ** Poster can't be bothered to put in a subject for the email.
and many active volunteers can't be bothered, or seem unable to grasp
it, that ANSWERING a subject-less message WITHOUT adding a decent
subject only makes things WORSE: doesn't make info easier to find
through search engines and guarantees that all those who manually
ignore or automatically filter empty subjects (because life's too
short for them) won't learn from the answer and will ask the same
question one week later.
(*) have you noticed that my message to users a few days ago,
signalling this very problem, was merrily ignored? See "very well
said, but not complete" above.
> ** Poster isn't subscribed in the first place (and won't necessarily
> see a reply anyway)
I and others were saying 5 years ago that the mess caused by allowing
unsubscribed people to post only had, in the long term, the effect to
drain life out of people who wanted to give support (see above). In
recent years, I have come to the conclusions that ooo_users may be one
of the very few list were an exception makes sense. But only if
support is given in an efficient way, of course.
> Frankly, I think the regular support team have a marvellous amount
> of patience.
with all respect for the regular support team, is continuing to do
things in a way that makes them waste much more time than needed, has
irritated quite a few people to the point the just unsubscribed, a
"marvellous amount of patience"?
I suggested two or three times, over one and a half year, how the
absolutely idiot, time-wasting and irritating practice of reposting
the same answer over and over to the list AND the unsubscribed
original poster "so everybody knew that unsubscribed poster had seen
the answer without risks of being annoyed by receiving it more than
once" could be avoided with an automated solution.
After wasting many hours (see the archives) explaining the basics of
email delivery and processing to people who seemed unable to tell an
email from a Martian spaceship, I got to the point where I asked on
list to one of them "please contact me off list, so I can help you to
set up on your linux computer a method to automate all this". To the
best of my knowledge, I've never been contacted. But he merrily
continued to fill mine and every subscriber mailboxes with duplicate
messages "so everybody knew that the unsubscribed poster etc..."
So I unsubscribed, and returned many months after, but without any
serious convintion that I could give effective support.
> But is it a good use of skilled people's time to give the same
> answers over and over?
what I'm respectfully suggesting here is that either they aren't that
skilled, or ignore the solutions proposed in the past or are simply
happy with how things are now. Which is OK (it's their time) if they
intend to remain the only ones giving regular support.
As I said, requests to explain what is clearly explained on page one
of the manual or "how to unsubscribe" messages happen all the times on
almost every list I follow. The real problems on [EMAIL PROTECTED] only happen
there and on other OOO lists, and are due to two reasons. One is that
OOO is such a critical software for Open Source success and its target
users are absolutely non programmers, so yes, there must be an higher
level of tolerance for their blunders.
The other are the unique "practices" mentioned above: practices which,
in the misguided effort to not bother those who will write to
[EMAIL PROTECTED] maybe once in their life, go to great length to make life
harder for those who want to remain subscribed.
The idea that, to give volunteer support through a mailing list, you
have to customize all your email environment in a way that is not
needed on any other mailing list, because of ways of dealing with
unsubscribed posters which are unheard of on any other mailing
list... is exactly one of the reason why many people eventually find
something else to do.
> To cut to the chase, my initial thought is to replace the moderators
> with some sort of FAQ engine:
history teaches that, even if you find somebody who does write such an
engine, it should be hosted outside openoffice.org, whose structure is
much slower to change than the course of stars.
This said, if a mailing list is managed decently, it _becomes_ a FAQ.
That is, if nobody ever answered a subject-less message without, if
nobody flooded the list with "reposting CC to the unsubscribed
poster", "how to I recognize unsubscribed posters" etc... the archive
would be more usable.
> an /unsubscribed/ user's email would be scanned automatically for
> keywords and matched against a selection of common FAQs.
apart from the problems above, this would work if the typical
unsubscribed users we're considering here had enough skills to put
relevant keywords in the message. Quite a few threads, instead,
require 6/7 messages only to bring the OP to a point where he or she
_asks_ one focused question which can be answered satisfactorily.
> What does the team think? Or am I alone in finding the present setup
> somewhat unsatisfactory?
Alone, you aren't. Personally, I've lost almost all interest in
supporting OpenDocument and FOSS in general by giving end user support
via [EMAIL PROTECTED] (and I'd never do it the way it's been done so far, for
the reasons above, that is it's terribly ineffective and it doesn't
make sense to me).
But it's a real shame that end user support to what is and will be for
millions of people their first encounter with Free Software is done in
this way, so I really hope this summary can be helpful to you and
others to change things for good this time!
Ciao,
Marco
--
Your own civil rights and the quality of your life heavily depend on
how software is used *around* you: http://digifreedom.net/node/84
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