[Wine] RFD: create new list and forum 'wine-newbies'

[Darragh Bailey]

On Fri, Mar 21, 2008 at 01:18:15PM -0400, Zachary Goldberg wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 21, 2008 at 12:51 PM, Dan Kegel <dank at kegel.com> wrote:
> > It has been suggested that the wine-users list
> >  is now too busy, and needs to be split into two:
> >  one for experienced users, and one for beginners.
> >  However, this might leave the beginners adrift
> >  without any experienced people to help them.
> >
> >  So I don't think we should do it unless at least
> >  a handful of experienced users are willing to join the
> >  new group and lend a hand.  I'm willing, but I
> >  can't do it all myself.
> >  Who else would be willing to join a wine-newbies
> >  list/forum and help support beginners?
> >  - Dan
> >
> >
> 
> I agree with Dan that I don't think that splitting the users list is
> worthwhile.  It simply fragments for the sake of reducing traffic.  We
> _FINALLY_ have some communication between the Wine community and our
> users looking for help and hopefully they are getting they help they
> need and we're learning how to avoid common trouble spots and fix them
> (And I do think this is happening).

I think the problem right now is that there is a bad signal to noise
ratio. I haven't really the time to respond to a lot of the questions
that are coming through at the moment, but I remain hopeful that over
time things will improve. I'm not sure that adding wine-newbies is going
to solve everything. If it is added, I will definitely join it too. I
still like to help out when possible, and that would only happen if I'm
on all the lists :)


Right now, there is definitely a problem in that there are so many
newbie questions that any advanced use/tweaks of wine to deal with
specific cases are being drowned out. I spotted that someone mentioned
that we have wine-devel for advanced questions. But there are a lot of
cases where someone just trying to get an application to work which
might need tweaks, registry changes, help with understanding what's
coming off the debug channels so that they can put together a bug report
for the developers. That IMHO shouldn't be going to the wine-devel list,
but is an advanced use case. With the huge amount of questions appearing
in wine-users, any advance use info will quickly be swamped and
disappear beneath the waves.


If wine-newbies is added, it may be worth making wine-users read-only
from the forum side. Otherwise you'll still likely get people thinking
that's the correct location to post any basic question about wine, since
they are a user of wine after all.

-- 
Darragh

"Nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently talented fool."