Re: Proposal for a comments system

[Paul Cutler <pcutler gnome org>]

On Tue, 2010-04-06 at 10:28 +0100, Phil Bull wrote:
> Hi Philip,
> 
> On Tue, 2010-04-06 at 01:12 +0100, Philip Withnall wrote:
> [...]
> > Are there any use cases for the comments system which would produce
> > comments which wouldn't need to be resolved (in whatever way) by
> > modifying the documentation? i.e. Are there any types of comments which
> > should always be visible on a page? If there aren't, the system could
> > just be a fancy interface to Bugzilla, automatically putting together a
> > bug report with details of which part of the documentation needs to be
> > changed.
> 
> I think that Shaun is proposing something similar to the "User
> contributed notes" used by the online PHP documentation [1].
> 
> One issue I'd like to pick up on is that people will definitely try to
> use this feature to ask for support. First of all, we should design the
> system in a such a way as to discourage this. Then, we'd need an easy
> way of forwarding support requests to an appropriate mailing
> list/forum/etc. I guess GNOME could sign up to Launchpad Answers...
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Phil
> 
> [1] - http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.expressions.php

That's my biggest concern - if we get comments we need to do something
with them.  It's like filing a bug - if the user takes time to go
through the steps, we owe them something.

Do we believe we have the bandwidth and process to do this?  Personally,
I don't know - especially considering the amount of documentation we
want to re-write (will this take away from writing?)

On the positive side, I think anything we can do to engage our users is
good and considering the amount of change GNOME 3.0 will introduce
getting direct user feedback on things we may have missed documenting or
isn't clear is a good thing.

Paul