Re: [tdf-discuss] unsubscribed posters

On 10/20/2010 11:50 PM, Drew Jensen wrote:
> 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.

OK, not *totally* passive!:-)   But I don't have to go to each website with forums of interest, log 
in, and navigate to each forum, and each thread in that forum, to see what's new. I get a nice 
presentation from my mail client (which I keep up basically all the time) showing all the new 
messages. In my case, I have all the OOo and LibO traffic directed to a common mailbox, so it's all 
there without my having to seek it out. I also have different mailboxes for each other list or 
family of lists I follow. Maybe I'm missing something about how I could use forums as easily? If 
not, for me the mailing lists require much less explicit activity on my part.

> > 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.

Well now, that's *very* interesting! I clearly haven't used forums in too long, I've never seen 
this. It still doesn't help with a forum analog of this conversation, though, since I didn't 
originate this thread.

> 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.
>
> ....

Wow! I knew I didn't want to force ML subscription for (most likely) short-term users, but these 
figures are fascinating.

> > 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..

Hooray! I'm definitely willing 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?

... and corresponding mailing lists.

> > 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

Are you saying there's already a wiki page established that we could use to collect all these 
thoughts? Or that I could create a page off the TDF wiki (assuming I would be able to get 
appropriate authorization) and run with it? In either case, wonderful -- what's the next step?

> Best wishes,
>
> Drew

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