On 9/24/10 Sep 24 -6:08 PM, Pascal J. Bourguignon wrote:
Robert Goldman rpgoldman@sift.info writes:
On 9/24/10 Sep 24 -9:26 AM, Pascal J. Bourguignon wrote:
Robert Goldman rpgoldman@sift.info writes:
On 9/24/10 Sep 24 -9:07 AM, Pascal J. Bourguignon wrote:
Robert Goldman rpgoldman@sift.info writes:
On 9/24/10 Sep 24 -3:49 AM, Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll wrote:
....
> 2- Lack *-user mailing list and need of subscription for questions. Is > there a sufficiently large comunity here and do we want to open the list?
With all due respect, opening a list is pretty much never a good idea. It's just asking for spam. Per my response to the above complainer, I think it would be great if there was a help web site that
Allowed OpenID login --- no need for new accounts
Served up questions to the interested through email digest and RSS.
As a potential question-answerer, I don't have time to log in to such a web site. I would need to have the questions pushed at me.
Is there any such existing software that we could adopt?
I'm using gmane, and the overhead to subscribe is really minimal: just reply to a message gmane sends back the first time you post...
So should we just set up an asdf-help mailing list?
For me it would be an easy and good enough solution, yes.
What's the protocol for potential help providers? How do we scan an asdf-help group of this type without (1) further clogging our inboxes; (2) having to explicitly visit a web site?
gmane is a nntp server.
Is there, e.g., an RSS-based solution so that we might, for example, glance over recent requests for help while scanning our blog subscriptions in Google Reader?
There's also http://gwene.org/ to pull back rss to nntp...
So you only need gnus to read those message.
But I object to rss for two reasons:
1- often the message is not complete, you only get the beginning and you have to go to the web to read the rest.
2- there's no way to answer. At least, with gmane, there's an nntp-to-email back gateway.
Yes, but the advantage of rss is that one can easily scan a large set of things in a single glance in a tool that one runs anyway. I glance at Google Reader at least once a day. I never run gnus, and I have one newsreader window in Thunderbird that I never look at, but am too lazy to delete.
This may not matter --- I may be atypical in this --- but I have completely given up on nntp. The only thing broken worse than email on the internet is news ;-)
On the other hand, I can see the advantages to myself of an asdf-help mailing list that I have a good excuse never to look at .... ;-)
Maybe we should take a straw poll on this mailing list to see what forms of asdf-help delivery would be most likely to get attention from people who are most likely to read.
A second question is: is this really necessary for any reason other than making Didier happy, which seems unlikely in any case?
What is broken about having people post questions to asdf-devel? Didier's objection to asdf-devel is that he didn't want to sign up for the mailing list. Why would it make him any happier to sign up for asdf-help instead of asdf-devel?
From the standpoint of a user who sometimes wants help, I would think
the best choice would be something forum like, where I could sign in using OpenID, so I didn't need a new account and password.
I just looked at StackOverflow, and there is an asdf tag there, and one can get updates to that tag using RSS.
That forum seems to meet Didier's needs --- no new account, no mailing list signup, and all of mine.
This URL seems to work:
http://stackoverflow.com/feeds/tag?tagnames=asdf&sort=hot
What about making this the official support channel?
If that's agreeable, we could list it, as well as the launchpad, in the manual.
best, r