[mythtv-users] Forums??

Ray Olszewski ray at comarre.com
Thu May 29 21:16:44 EDT 2003


The problem with using forums to support beginners ("newbies") is that the 
forums need some experienced users to answer the questions that beginners 
ask. In my experience (with Linux and elsewhere), there is no shortage of 
people who ask questions, but too few who both have the knowledge and are 
willing to spend the time to answer them (correctly).

So don't pay attention to what people who *ask* questions want (unless you 
are trying to set up a paid-support system or have some other, practical 
reason of that sort). Pay attention to how the people who will *answer* 
questions want them asked. This recurring thread suggests to me that the 
experienced people -- Isaac himself,  I note, but I think others too -- 
prefer the mailing list, and they get more votes than the beginners.

This same consideration, BTW, also argues for not setting up a separate 
beginners list ... it makes it too easy for experienced users not to see 
the beginner questions.

I suppose if there is some painless way to combine the two, that's fine. 
(Though I'm on one Sourceforge list that does it poorly -- forum questions 
get mailed to the list, but there is no way to mail answers back to the 
forum; you have to log into the forum to post answers, and getting someone 
actually to do that is an ongoing weakness of the method.) Actually, a 
forum doesn't then even need to be part of the Myth site, just to interact 
with the list ... so anyone really interested in setting it up can do so at 
any convenient site.


At 04:01 AM 5/30/2003 +0200, Ben Bucksch wrote:
>Taking the risk of beating the dead horse...
>
>Ben Davis wrote:
>
>>Email lists are good for support, but I think regular discussion that 
>>does not require support should be posted in a forum.
>heh, and I thought the opposite - forums for the newbies support and 
>regular development / idea discussion on mailing lists :).
>
>Personally, I think that email software is far superiour and more 
>(time-)efficient than a web based solution, but I see that others (usually 
>newbies, in my biased world-view :-) ) disagree. What might be nice would 
>be a forum<->mailing list gateway, similar to 
><http://www.gossamer-threads.com/archive/MythTV_C2/Users_F11/>, but with 
>posting capabilities. Isaac's concern of invalid From email addresses 
>could be addressed with requiring a working email address for subscribers 
>(and only allowing subscribers to post, of course), if you handle the 
>bounces :).






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