Re: Proposal for a comments system

[Anirudh <anirudh anirudhsanjeev org>]

Hi,

What is the exact motivation for using a comments system? I can see it
serve two purposes - one to point out any errors, inconsistencies or
ambiguous documentation, and the other to ask questions. If it's the
latter, you'll end up having a lot of people asking questions from the
related to unrelated \- as sometimes people are desperate to reach out
and find some help.

On an article about Desktop resolution settings, someone might post
"Help! My sound doesn't work" and get disappointed as nobody looks or
is willing to help. Also if you are interested in deploying a comment
system purely for online usage, you might consider using Disqus[1] or
IntenseDebate[2]. These work really well for preventing spam but call
non-free systems on the backend, which might be a problem. These also
prevent the need to rewrite the library server code to work with
threaded comments, etc.

I've written a program called Splatter [3] that retrieves comments and
bugs from bugzilla and caches them locally. What I learned while doing
that is it's pretty hard to keep a server resource and local resource
in sync, both for the server and the client (then again I am pretty
naive and inexperienced), but writing a desktop client to work with a
cloud service and download _only_ the updates since last time, and to
cache all the existing updates can lead to all sorts of problems.

Thanks,
Anirudh

[1] - http://disqus.com/
[2] - http://intensedebate.com/
[3] - http://anirudhsanjeev.org/projects/splatter
--
Senior undergraduate student, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.
http://anirudhsanjeev.org



On Tue, Apr 6, 2010 at 5:50 PM, Paul Cutler <pcutler gnome org> wrote:
> 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
>
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