Re: Betr.: Re: Rename strange/unexpected behavior.

On Tue, Jan 25, 2011 at 3:29 PM, Arthur Barrett <
arthur.barrett-qn/[email protected]> wrote:

> 1. People were not leaving the community - rather joining.
>
> Before we removed the zero-dollar downloads we had record numbers of
> downloads and installations of the software every day.  These people
> were not engaging in the community and not contributing towards
> development and crucially - when they experienced problems did not get
> help but tended to spread misinformation.
>
> We have a much more active community now that we've removed the
> zero-dollar downloads, because everyone who purchases CVSNT is actively
> engaged and getting support and advice about how to use it and resolve
> problems.
>

I'll admit that I don't know what sort of community you're trying to build,
but if you observe how the leaders of that area have formed their
communities, that is not how they did it.  Wikipedia, linux, and phpBB, for
example, attracted their communities by providing a compelling product, with
the biggest attractive force being that they were offering it for free ("as
in beer", as they say).  Then they attract volunteers or enthusiasts from
that pool.  They do have a lot of noise in their signal, but they have so
much bandwidth that it barely matters.  While charging for entry certainly
restricts the type of person that wants to enter, you might want to
reconsider whether it is really "growth" and whether you're barring so many
people that this strategy is counterproductive long-term.  At Cornell (from
which I recently graduated), they went directly from regular CVS, for
teaching basic concepts, to Git and Hg for collaboration in more realistic
high-octane projects.  Anecdotally, I've been quite unaware of its presence
- until recently I've only known CVSNT in the context of "Secunia PSI keeps
complaining about security holes in this thing that came with TortoiseCVS,
but I apparently can't update it because it's behind a pay wall".

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