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

On 23 November 2010 18:14, T. J. Brumfield <enderandrew@gmail.com> wrote:

> 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?

That is quite common with Linux applications. Certainly links from the
application help to on-line search of discussions etc should be relatively
easy.

Only draw back I can think of is potentially broken links. One advantage to
linking to say a public editable page would be that if you found the help
unhelpful but then realised why you could document it for others and
eventually the improvements could find their way in to the application help.
-- 
Ian

Ofqual Accredited IT Qualifications
The Schools ITQwww.theINGOTs.org +44 (0)1827 305940

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