Re: [tdf-discuss] unsubscribed posters

On Wed, 2010-10-20 at 19:55 -0500, Barbara Duprey wrote:

Howdy Barbara

> I don't have anything against forums (though I hope we can avoid having two top-level ones, as 
> for 
> OOo, and careful planning is needed in determining the subforums).  The main difference, which is 
> a 
> positive for some and a negative for others, 

A breif look at some numbers - and ideas for how we offer mail
lists/forums maybe.

> is that mailing lists are passive (people get mail when 

No, they must run some type of reader - this can include a notification
agent in their OS or Browser. 

> it's posted) and forums/newsgroups require action to see messages. 

Every web forum I know of send notification email to the original poster
whenever a response is posted to a thread they created.

With that in mind there is no real difference between traditional mail
lists and web forums for the majority of end user support questions.

The vast number of these people come ask a question or two, they desire
a timely reply and if the are helped they may not come to ask another
question in a long time, if ever again.

The number of new joins and the number of new topics being in synch is a
result of this. Here is the en only forums status as of a few minutes
ago:

http://oucv.org/images/usooo-frm-daily.png

If you analyze the mailing list archives at OO.o for number of posts to
email addresses this is a huge distribution difference.

If you do the same analyses on the 10 years of OooForum posts and the
last 5 years of the fr forum at u.s.oo.o and the 3 years for the
remaining user.services forums the numbers break down quite nearly
identical to the mailing lists in distribution.

In the last 3 years the user.services forum has had 35,000 plus people
that signed up, asked their 2.x questions and most I think got a
reasonable answer in a reasonable amount of time.

http://oucv.org/images/usooo-frm-totals.png

You mentioned two top level forums, actually that is two English top
level. So for overall activity you need to, almost, double those figures
- there is a percentage of people that cross post questions, but it is
not particularly high, or at least was not last time I took the time to
try an count it (about 2 years ago..and it was minimal < 15% of topics
as best I could gather)

So take that number, 35,000 and make it ~60,000 people that would of
subscribed / and want to very quickly un-subscribe / from the ML, 20,000
more a year.

....
> I do, myself, 
> which may be why I see the balance between the two mechanisms differently than you.
>
> In that regard, the modification of the Reply-To is, 

Yes I agree the current footer on the ML should be changed IMO 

But the key is, even if people have to subscribe, don't make it so they
are required to un-subscribe, necessarily. 

> I think, more likely to give a false sense of 
> security than to fix the problem of people not getting responses they would benefit from. 


> However, 
> there's an approach I hope we can agree on, which is having the moderator send an unsubscribed OP 
> a 
> message that, among other things, tells them how to use a page like the one Drew has developed 
> (http://oucv.org/tdf.html) to follow their threads on nabble without having to subscribe. 

<NOTE to self: need wiki page for how to work with Nabble > ;-/ or
anyone wanting to help..

>  If we had a similar page for OOo, it would make an 
> enormous difference there, as well.

Why not - http://oucv.org/oooext.html

I did not setup that nabble archive, and can't change settings - if you
back up there to the openoffice level you are actually looking at a flat
view of the users ML at oo.o - the others are available also, but I did
not find a decent forum/sub-forum view.

> I also think there are possibilities in creating sublists in parallel with the subforums; the 
> main 
> thing I'm concerned about here is getting into lots of redirection from the "beginning" 
> list/forum 
> to the subs, unless it's really necessary because the question drives too deep for appropriate 
> handling at a generalist's level. (Sort of like the Level 1/ Level 2/ Level 3 support structure 
> used 
> by most help desks I've known about.)

Ok - I agree that there is need for both aggregate and segregated views
to topics - I'd say the segregated produces more results for support
situations - look back at the numbers for daily activity.

60 topic posts a day - simple indicator to me anyway, number per day of
those for Math, Draw and Base - in the aggregated ML Math and Draw
specific questions are reasonably infrequent, Base perhaps more so, but
Base is really the only one with a functioning segregated ML for user
support - in the forums there would be avg > 1 for Math, > 4 for Draw
and > 10 for Base. (good estimate I think but didn't run actual numbers
lately)

That said, I'm good with the idea of an aggregate user (All modules and
extensions in one place) and segregated web forums - which I think is
what you are suggesting, yes?


> Developing the kind of structure and the related message I'm talking about here, and that has 
> been 
> recommended by others, will take significant collaboration. I'm trying to learn about wikis so I 
> can 
> host and manage one on this subject, but I'd gladly defer to somebody else who can put one up on 
> the 
> TDF site where it really belongs. Any takers?

It's a wiki - be fearless..you can't really break it - well, not really

Best wishes,

Drew



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