Community communication
I’ve allways liked helping people over the net, when I’m bored I tend to fallback to that behavior and find somewhere I can be assist others. Since my involvement with Beryl, this has meant I’ve been helping a lot of people on IRC and the forum, answering on large amounts of threads and questions with what I hope is techincal insight.
This has also lead me to realise that we need to improve the FAQ, Documentation, suggestion/wishlist and trac work. There are fa too many similar bugs, threads and whatnot. I know racarr recently posted a blog about what’s feasable and not (we spoke about it on IRC before he did this), and I’ve also started to update the FAQ section of the forum whenever possible.
I’m also trying to involve more developers in this, but for this to happen properly there needs to be a little bit of self constrain on what people post. The forum is too high traffic and too much duplication and general crazyness… I’m not telling people not to post crazy ideas, I just hope they will read the new FAQ section first. Also the threads run wild sometimes… I think that the main reason for a lack of developer involvement (there are a few of us reading the forum and the ideas do eventually reach us, but hardly everyone follows the forum…) is that us devs tend to get bored with what to us might seem like silly or trivial problems.
The solution to this is of course to make the documentation good enough for there not to be any trivial and silly posts. And then there’s the wiki… I suspect this is an area that can be greatly improved. The information probably changes regularly and I can’t remember the last time I personally used anything there. I don’t even find it trustworthy to be honest. Too many third-party repositories… It essentialy needs some attention, preferably from someone highly experienced with Beryl.
So anyway, these are just a few late-night rambelings of a much too tierd monkey, I’ve set myself a informal goal though: to climb down from the number 2 spot on the “post count” list of the forum. When my input is no longer necesarry is when I’m going to be happy 
agreed, the wiki and such needs to be updated…..(on the forums i said i was gonna go through the suggestions section and put that onto the wiki…i started, and then i had other things that had to be done, then i got sick, etc….one day i’ll get there….but i believe once that is done, at least there may not be such repetition in the suggestions section (theroetically)) and such things should be done for the other sections :D)
also, why would you want to climb _down_ the post count list ?? especially since you’re practically the only developer who interacts with the community a large amount……….like especially when looking at the post count list, the only other developer in the top 25 is the great cyberorg…..(not that i’m saying that’s necessarily bad that the devs don’t spend much time on the forums….but if you spend less time on the forums…..what devs do we have to talk with on the forums ??)
(though at least you haven’t set a goal of going up….i don’t believe that would be possible
(lol))
Comment by Delfick — January 4, 2007 @ 5:42 am
The reason I want to climb down is not because I don’t want the community to get the answers and interaction they need from developers, it’s because I don’t want it to be necesarry for me to answer everything because a lot of the answers should be available otherwhere
If that is the case, then people like yourself will be able to answer questions that previously were only answered by developers, and the developers can focus on developing and when they do interact on the forum, it’s beneficial for both the developer and users. Right now, I’d say about 25% of the threads I post in actually contribute to what I do for beryl, the rest is largly support or answering questions that shouldn’t have to be asked. I want to cut down on the 75%, not by letting posts go unanswered, but by letting them be answered before they’re asked.
Comment by kristian — January 5, 2007 @ 5:01 pm
Yep that makes sense
Comment by Defick — January 6, 2007 @ 12:08 am
what about creating a Beryl-Book in PDF for the end-user
cheers!
Comment by euskal — February 24, 2007 @ 9:29 am
if you access the wiki now in this moment you´ll see that it´s erased (spam, etc)…
¿Mazin07, is the sysops?, or to whom should I claim same admin/burocrat status
I need to block lots of IP´s (tons)..
Bye!
Comment by euskal — February 24, 2007 @ 9:35 am