Re: [development] #drupal and #drupal-contribute split
I think aside from ontological questions pertaining to particular social groupings, a more important point was passed yesterday, and I don't even remember who said it. But what I took away from it was this: The proper place for answers to any questions that are bound to be asked over and over again is NOT a live channel or email list at all. The proper place for FAQs is a website. If you ask FAQs on a developer list - ANY developer list - the proper answer is a URL. Or a handful of URLs. Whether they are "intended" to work this way or not, the Forums (and to a lesser degree, the Groups) actually serve this kind of purpose very well. The Forums are always my first stop, and often my last. If I had a major say in any restructuring of the Drupal cosmos, I would try to centralize the Forums and Groups in peoples' minds, and make much better use of taxonomy on d.o. An Exercise: If you find yourself about to answer the same question for the 3rd time, don't do it. Instead, go out to the Forums, open an issue or start a handbook page. Put your answer there. Title it well. Tag it well. From then on, just answer with the URL. Then the listmembers and IRCsters could go back to saying "RTFM" and the noobs would know where to go. LVX TF --- As If Productions http://www.asifproductions.com Interactive Worlds and Immersive Obsessions
I hate to say this, since it is our own dog food, but it's incredibly hard to find useful, timely information in both the forums and the groups. If I cannot find my answer in the structured documents (which are for the most part great), or in the code myself, I try Google against the whole web next. If that doesn't work, I head to IRC. On Fri, Mar 18, 2011 at 4:57 PM, As If Productions < everyone@asifproductions.com> wrote:
Whether they are "intended" to work this way or not, the Forums (and to a lesser degree, the Groups) actually serve this kind of purpose very well. The Forums are always my first stop, and often my last. If I had a major say in any restructuring of the Drupal cosmos, I would try to centralize the Forums and Groups in peoples' minds, and make much better use of taxonomy on d.o.
Random info without solid tags is very difficult to deal with. Bugs come and go and carefully phrasing a query is hard. I can't count the number of time I have issued a search on Drupal looking for a solution to something I think is a bug. What turns up is frequently a bug in a current release and what appears to be the very same bug in a very old release like 4.7. Far too many of the search results have no info about to which release they apply. In a similar vein, looking at an issue queue for a particular module I find what appears to be a solution for my bug and it even notes that it has been committed, but not to what release it was committed, usually to some -dev release but it is not obvious when one of the many -dev gets into a real point release. I strongly prefer dealing with only point releases for production sites. On Fri, Mar 18, 2011 at 7:05 PM, Chris Johnson <cxjohnson@gmail.com> wrote:
I hate to say this, since it is our own dog food, but it's incredibly hard to find useful, timely information in both the forums and the groups. If I cannot find my answer in the structured documents (which are for the most part great), or in the code myself, I try Google against the whole web next.
If that doesn't work, I head to IRC.
On Fri, Mar 18, 2011 at 4:57 PM, As If Productions < everyone@asifproductions.com> wrote:
Whether they are "intended" to work this way or not, the Forums (and to a lesser degree, the Groups) actually serve this kind of purpose very well. The Forums are always my first stop, and often my last. If I had a major say in any restructuring of the Drupal cosmos, I would try to centralize the Forums and Groups in peoples' minds, and make much better use of taxonomy on d.o.
participants (3)
-
As If Productions -
Chris Johnson -
Walt Daniels