Re: [tdf-discuss] Re: A proposal for effective, volunteer-friendly user support in LibreOffice

There are open software stacks with various CMS tools where you can combine
wiki, blog, forum, and FAQ functionality together. A community site could
have articles on the front end to help demonstate features, provide
tutorials, expose new templates and extensions, etc.

Users can provide comments and questions on the articles as well as post in
the forums. Duplicate questions are bound to occur in forums. The problem
with that is retyping the same solutions time and time again. But if there
is an integrated wiki/knowledgebase in the site, then you can link to the
solution there.

My concern is that many users expect help to be present in the application
itself, and not everyone is willing to go and find answers in a community.
Could the application itself pull its "Help" functionality from online
resources?

-- T. J.

On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 11:52 AM, Kevin Vermeer <reemrevnivek@gmail.com>wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 12:28 PM, Nathan <nathan1465@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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