Re: Web links integration in applications: bugs, translations, help...
- From: Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt myrealbox com>
- To: desktop-devel-list List <desktop-devel-list gnome org>
- Subject: Re: Web links integration in applications: bugs, translations, help...
- Date: Sat, 1 Dec 2007 01:38:42 +1300
On Nov 28, 2007, at 8:33 AM, Loïc Minier wrote:
On Tue, Nov 27, 2007, Andre Klapper wrote:
...
i love firefox because of explanations that even my parents would
understand, if they'd touch computers.
"The page you are trying to view contains POSTDATA that has expired
from cache."
but currently, 30% of non-crasher evolution reports are already
"can't send mail. please help" reports, because of the "Submit Bug
Report" menu item. i have the feeling it will become more. ;-)
Hehe, I heard from our Firefox maintainer that he receives all kind of
non-bug reports thanks to the "Help > Report a problem" menu entry in
Ubuntu; "My wife is gone", "My cat is sick" etc. :)
I think linking to a bug tracker directly makes sense only if your user
base is less than about five million (plus or minus a few million).
Beyond that, the signal-to-noise ratio gets too low to be worth it.
I guess the problem of receiving "can't send mail" bug reports might
be helped a little by having two different entries in Help; Ubuntu
currently has "Report a Problem" (it's "report a bug" in French
though), and "Get help online"
Not so helpful if the reason you can't send mail is that you aren't
online. ;-)
(this points to the community support portal).
...
This requires people to choose immediately which source of help is more
likely to answer their question -- "Help Contents" or "Get Help Online"
-- without having any of the knowledge necessary to make that decision.
A more humane approach would be to provide a smooth escalation path:
built-in help -> on-line help -> support forums or paid support.
That still means you need external URLs, just not in the Help menu
itself. For example, if you do a search in Yelp and none of the results
are what you're looking for, the search results page gives you a link
to try the same search on gnomesupport.org. That link is designed to be
customizable by distributors, so it can search the distribution's
knowledge base or support forums instead.
Cheers
--
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/
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