Re: a rose by any other name

Sven Luther writes:
 > 
 > Ok, ...
 > 
 > As you may have noticed, i did a little inquiry regarding the people who
 > did write to the list with support questions. Not all of them responded
 > (only 3 or 4), and it seems they all got to the list trough google, or
 > so and choose what seemed the more adequate for them.
 > 
 > Ideas to make it better are :
 > 
 >   o Make the [email protected] mailing list more visible in :
 > 
 >     http://www.xfree86.org/mailman/listinfo
 > 
 >     Possibly by moving this list to be the first one, or having a first
 >     paragraph in the page that say, use list [email protected] for
 >     support questions or such.
 > 
 >   o Add a 'Get Help' link in the top level content. (Already
 >     implemented) so that people don't wander around searching for help.
 > 
 >     Notice that :
 > 
 >     http://www.xfree86.org/ and http://www.xfree86.org/help.html
 > 
 >     Are now top two hit for a google search for "xfree86 help", which
 >     may improve things.
 > 
 >   o Other feeling i had with discussing this problem with the few people
 >     who responded, especially from the french guys, is that they had the
 >     impression that the list was xfree86 (xfree86.org) and thus wrote to
 >     the forum at xfree86, or something such.
 > 
 > Anyway, i don't really know, we will know with time if it has helped,
 > but my guess is that the already implemented 'Get Help' and the fact
 > that google will now fall on these links easily will be a great tool to
 > minimize the number of off-topic lists.
 > 
 > That said, a search for "xfree86 support" will yield the toplevel page
 > and http://www.xfree86.org/support.html, which only has a link to the
 > mailing lists. Maybe adding a link to the getting help there and on top
 > of the mailing list page would be an additional precaution, but maybe it
 > is too much, i don't know.
 > 
 > Also, maybe there are other search strings that are commonly used for
 > support question and xfree86, and we should look for them.
 > 
 > Anyway, i will continue responding to the misguided support seeking
 > users, so it is not needfull for other to do the same, and also notice
 > that at least one of these misguided users recomended me that i ask you
 > all to be a little less rude to these misguided posts.
 > 

Mailing lists are not always the optimal way to provide support
to people. Looking over the support questions on [email protected]
consumes a considerable amount of my time. Time that could be spent
more effectively on some development work. Even though most of these
emails are handled by our faithful support team I (and I assume most
other developers) still look over all of them briefly to check if 
there may be a bug behind the reported problem.

I assume about 50% of all the questions posted on this list are 
redundant including our one all time favourite "Can't find font: fixed".
We must therefore get away from encouraging everybody to seek individual
and personal help. One way to do this is to create an FAQ - something
that is currently being worked on. 

However we must route people seeking help first to this FAQ and from 
there to the support mailing lists. As long as the log of a crashed 
Xserver tells people to report their problem to xfree86@ we will see
many more of these redundant support questions.

BTW: An FAQ is currently being worked on.

Egbert.