[Wine] BUG: Forum driving away experienced users

[Paul Johnson]

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On Friday 21 March 2008 01:52:35 pm AlanJ wrote:
> Trouble is if you split the list into newbies and non-newbies the people
> the other Alan despises so much won't think of themselves as newbies.

I agree with you that an experienced user/newbie split is probably sub-optimal 
for the reason you describe.  My experience with debian-user and the Ubuntu 
forums over the years has taught me two things:

1) Newbies will use mailing lists, too.  However, the questions asked on 
mailing lists are generally better thought out and are easier to read (both 
based on the interface involved as well as the writer's attempt at English).
All one has to do is thumb through Ubuntu's forums and Debian's mailing lists 
to see the difference here.  Even many Ubuntu users get frustrated with the 
forums and go hijack the Debian lists instead, since usually the two are 
close enough and the odds of getting a clueful answer out of the forums is 
near nil.

2) Expecting users to read the documentation before posting is not 
unreasonable.

> As a relative newbie myself I find it hard to swallow some of the
> near-elitist attitude shown by some experts, calling someone who isn't as
> experienced as you a noob is just plain insulting. I hope when those people
> learn something new they don't get a dose of their own medicine as I doubt
> they will like it.

This isn't about whether or not people posting have as much experience as 
everyone else.  If that were the case, there really would not be any reason 
for any list to exist except wine-devel.  This /is/ about whether or not we 
should make it easy for people who can't write a proper sentence (much less a 
smart question to solve their problem) or who want free handholding with no 
effort on their part (if they want that, they should go pay Codeweavers for 
support, not beg the public).  If newbies can't be bothered to meet the 
experienced users half-way, what is the motivation to meet them halfway?  

It's not elitist to think that wine can't do the same thing Debian has with 
it's lists.  The lowest common denominator needs to be set at the lowest 
point experienced users are willing to tolerate without scaring off the 
newbies that are willing to help us help them.  Right now, I feel the LCD is 
set to the lowest point AOL-level newbies are willing to tolerate, 
experienced users be damned.

> How you deal with the people who don't read the FAQs, check the AppDB, etc
> and can't post a thought out question is the miilion dollar question that
> every help/support person would love to know the answer to.

Having worked the public helpdesk before, that's a pretty cut and clear 
answer:  No free tech support, period.  In one case, the product was a 
service and a large, long-time loyal customer started a community list to 
fill that niche.  In another, the product had an open source project to which 
the commercial version was closely related, and that filled the niche.  On 
both lists, the general attitude from the community to the stupid questions 
was "Go pay $VENDOR to help you if you can't read the manual."

Debian's not that much different.  Even there, there's occasionally the 
persistently clueless (not a noob, but someone who seems to actively repel 
clues) who get told to hit the Debian consultants page and pay someone to 
help them...

- -- 
Paul Johnson
baloo at ursine.ca
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