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From: "Dennis E. Hamilton" <dennis.hamilton@acm.org>
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Subject: RE: User facing web items
Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2011 17:56:17 -0700
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Wow, Stack Overflow.

Interesting. =20

Not sure how it would work for (power) users in the case of OOo, but =
definitely something to think about.  I'd vote for same as, but don't =
know if that's workable.

A lot depends on how well search can be made to work so users can find =
existing threads on their topic without much pain.

 - Dennis

-----Original Message-----
From: Ross Gardler [mailto:rgardler@opendirective.com]=20
Sent: Friday, June 17, 2011 16:50
To: ooo-dev@incubator.apache.org
Subject: Re: User facing web items

On 18 June 2011 00:33, Andy Brown <andy@the-martin-byrd.net> wrote:

> "Is a forum the right solution today", good
> question but I have seen flame wars break out over that very topic in =
some
> mailing list.  I prefer mailing list but understand why end users =
prefer a
> forum so I would support us keeping it.

:-)

Recently there were discussions in the ASF about using something like
(or the same as) StackOverflow. for this kind of support.

Today I read that the recent Eclipse Community Survey had found that
StackOverflow was extremely important (being more important than their
internal support forums).

You are right to avoid the flame war, but at the same time now might
be a really good time to consider alternative user support mechanisms
since if you want to host this in the ASF it will require infra to
support some new tool anyway. As you've already heard infra don't take
that kind of responsibility on lightly and it might be possible to get
more projects to pitch in to help infra if a "more modern approach to
user support were adopted.

Of course, it would make sense to get a dump of the contents of those
forums (licence permitting) anyway and that should really be the
initial focus.

Ross


--=20
Ross Gardler <rgardler@opendirective.com>
Programme Leader (Open Development)
OpenDirective http://opendirective.com