Kristian Lyngstøl's Blog

Community communication

Posted on 2007-01-03

I've allways liked helping people over the net, when I'm bored I tend to fallback to that behavior and find somewhere I can be assist others. Since my involvement with Beryl, this has meant I've been helping a lot of people on IRC and the forum, answering on large amounts of threads and questions with what I hope is techincal insight.

This has also lead me to realise that we need to improve the FAQ, Documentation, suggestion/wishlist and  trac work. There are fa too many similar bugs, threads and whatnot. I know racarr recently posted a blog about what's feasable and not (we spoke about it on IRC before he did this), and I've also started to update the FAQ section of the forum whenever possible.

I'm also trying to involve more developers in this, but for this to happen properly there needs to be a little bit of self constrain on what people post. The forum is too high traffic and too much duplication and general crazyness... I'm not telling people not to post crazy ideas, I just hope they will read the new FAQ section first. Also the threads run wild sometimes... I think that the main reason for a lack of developer involvement (there are a few of us reading the forum and the ideas do eventually reach us, but hardly everyone follows the forum...) is that us devs tend to get bored with what to us might seem like silly or trivial problems.

The solution to this is of course to make the documentation good enough for there not to be any trivial and silly posts. And then there's the wiki... I suspect this is an area that can be greatly improved. The information probably changes regularly and I can't remember the last time I personally used anything there. I don't even find it trustworthy to be honest. Too many third-party repositories... It essentialy needs some attention, preferably from someone highly experienced with Beryl.

So anyway, these are just a few late-night rambelings of a much too tierd monkey, I've set myself a informal goal though: to climb down from the number 2 spot on the "post count" list of the forum. When my input is no longer necesarry is when I'm going to be happy :)