OK, but I mean (don't hit me for this) take a look at Cedega. They have a forum and a wiki and have loads of user input. This generates (inter)activity of users and 'promotes' the application in a certain way, people like to tell other people something finally works :-)
5. First you need to search for a bug. A normal user wouldn't know what things to select and would need to 'guess' where to fill in the keywords etc. The search form looks threatening/scary, so it needs to be simplified into (for example) keyword and wine version. With the bug submission page I wouldn't know what to fill in at "Component" and "Priority". And there's no real place to 'attach' a error report/log to (for example a +seh debug channel)
By the way, I hate the AppDB comments/summarize where people put a error log or something into the comment and/or the summary (under what doesn't work).... This clearly states that people aren't using bugzilla. So if we (Wine) would be a bit more user-friendly I guess it would get the ball rolling. Offtopic: I myself would volunteer to be a moderator on the forum.
On 1/9/06, James Hawkins truiken@gmail.com wrote:
On 1/9/06, S. Schauenburg s.schauenburg@gmail.com wrote:
Back onto the main topic. Remarks made:
- AppDB needs a revamp. Maybe drop the maintainers (those things just
need to be set by developers only). Just have a look at the activity of all the maintainers in the last year. **Read on for suggestions to drop the AppDB.
What is the point of dropping maintainers? Activity is always appreciated, but for most apps it doesn't take much. It either works out of the box, or the status doesn't really change much over the releases. Simply putting up a HOWTO is the most some maintainers need to do for an app. The maintainer doesn't need to report back to the appdb every release to say no regressions have occurred.
- Create a Wine forum. This solves the problem of users asking the
same questions over and over again. Here also the "comments" of the AppDB could be centralized (because most of them aren't really comments)
The AppDB comments need to stay where they are. Each comment is specific to a particular app and only shows up on that app's page. We already have wine-users, bugzilla, and the appdb for users to communicate about wine. Adding a forum would spread ourselves too thin.
- With a forum in place, the user-mailing list could be dropped and
maybe also even the devel-mailing list.
hehe that'll never happen.
- Create a Wine Wiki, instead of the AppDB. Only certain developers
(or maybe users) can set/edit certain pages. Then also howto's could be inserted here.
wiki.winehq.org
- It's too difficult for users to add a bugreport. Either create a
small program/app which does it for the user (like "Submit this bugreport" *click*) and you're done. The other option is to create a simplified method for searching and inserting a bug report, because from a users view, there are too many options. (and probably the user wouldn't even know what to click on. Don't forget to give the users the option to 'add' a file with certain 'debug channels' (which ones? only +seh?)
I don't see how a program would make submitting bugs easier. I'm guessing you're thinking about a crash reporter, which would report a bug with the crash info/backtrace etc, but that would just flood the bugzilla with duplicate crash-only bugs. I'm curious as to what user's find hard about submitting bug reports. If you know, please post the issues here.
- Users need to know that if they submit a bug report (when it's
simplified) that it actually HELPS you, the developers. So it's "Help us, help you".
I agree.
-- James Hawkins