Re: Hosting FAQs on jGuru +1

["Daniel F. Savarese" <df...@savarese.org>]

>>>from the forum to the FAQ (our standard system).  We will need a
>>>participating project to provide a manager.  It should require about
>>1-3hrs
>>>a week from the manager (depending on how busy the Forum/FAQ is).  Is

-1

Reasons:
  o The FAQs at jGuru are mostly AQs and are not adequately subcategorized
    within a category.  Keyword searching is not as useful as a
    well-organized table of contents.
  o I'm not donating 1-3 hours a week of my time to help
    jGuru/MageLang's advertising revenue.  I've done this type of Q&A work
    in the past and I'm not doing it again.  You wade through thousands
    of questions, most of which are repeats of previously asked questions
    because the questioners never bother to search all of the already
    answered questions (mostly because keyword searching isn't very useful).
    It turns into a major time sink if you care about doing the job right.
  o jGuru forums bypass and possibly defeat jakarta user mailing lists.
  o The best FAQs are works of writing and not hasty online Q&A's.

There's a counterargument to or opposite view for each of my reasons, but
they represent my opinion.  At the very least, if the vote approves going
with jGuru, I would advocate requiring that we be able to generate an HTML
file cosolidating the complete FAQ list for a project so that it may be
distributed with a release.  I shouldn't have to be online to get access
to a FAQ for software I've installed.  My preference is for questions to
be culled from mailing lists and that a FAQ be maintained as a written
document along with the project documentation in CVS.  Online Q&A systems
tend to rot (you have to poll them to answer questions) and yield low-quality
results (entropy sets in quickly) because they are not tightly coupled to
the development process.

daniel



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