Capitalize forum Knowledge : should we set up a process ?

I think we need to make sure that knowledge contained in the forums is structured and capitalized systematically. The more post we have in the forums, the less the internal search engine is efficient at finding information : more than once, I noticed I had to point people to the right thread based on my own memory. This is not good.

I think losts of questions or solutions in forum post could either :
- be made part of a FAQ (with a structuring effort though...)
- be made part of the doc or tutorials

I also think we are loosing bugs and bugfix sometimes : the growing number of posts and users makes it harder to systematically ask people to submit bugs in FlySpray or if they don’t, do it on their account. I’ve been doing this with the (much smaller) french community.

Doing this, I found most people do not dare (or care) to submit bugs. It’s like they think it’s a tool for the dev team or are afraid they are not proficient enough to be able to make a clear bug report.

How could we try to improve in those two areas, so that knowledge isn’t lost or stored in each of our memories ?

First off, FlySpray (the bugtracker we are using right now) is making great strides in both usability (they put some AJAX in!) and structure (they added a roadmap feature!) in the development version. Once that version goes public I think alot of people will find the bugtracker easier to use and more friendly.

As for the FAQ’s I’m ALL FOR IT so long as the "official FAQ" resides on the main support site (and are just linked to in the forums)

I didn’t mean that FlySpray was not user friendly, it is and frankly it’s far better than the tool available on sourceforge (and any tool I have used so far). I think it’s more of a side effect of the forums efficiency : people get answers and get them fast => they don’t bother to submit bugs or problems because most of the time, the thing will be solved even before it’s submited...

Forums are great, but not when it comes to capitalize knowledge, in my opinion. I think the FAQ could be the missing link between the forums and the doc. It’s a first step to formulate a structured answer. The doc is yet another step of making a coherent whole with those answers.

I agree about the FAQ being part of the official site (and Aour has built a FAQ snippet ). FAQs have limitation and can become clumsy. More often than not, they are not read (I can see that, since I have been trying to maintain a FAQ for the french forums). But you can refer to them when asked a recurring question : it’s a time saver for me, and also it forces me to make a note of what thread contain answers to typical problems. I have links handy when I need them.

I think it could help doc writing too...

Flyspray should be for bugs that can’t be resolved in the forum or that require hacking the core/core snippets in order to work. If they don’t get listed in flyspray, they’re likely to remain unresolved.

Quote from: rthrash at Feb 02, 2006, 04:29 PM

Flyspray should be for bugs that can’t be resolved in the forum or that require hacking the core/core snippets in order to work. If they don’t get listed in flyspray, they’re likely to remain unresolved.

So it means we still need to have a knowledge base system to keep track all the support quesiton and the solutions, just like having a helpdesk system for MODx. So all the moderator or support for MODx can help the newbie to get started. So basically, if david know the solution, it doesn’t have to wait for David to answer those question, but we all can help them with it, or in fact, if the newbie is smart and diligent enough, they can search on it by themselves.

It’s just a thought though, even though it will add more consuming effort to keep track on this KB system. My other thought would be to create a dummy user, and use bookmarking forum topic provided by this system. So this bookmarking tool will keep all the important post made on the forum, while allowing people to search within the limit of this bookmarking data. Any thought on this? Never have a lot of experience with this, maybe Zi or Mark could help out.

Sincerely,

I love the idea of a knowledgebase. Jason has a lot of exerience in that regard.