Re: Campaign for a Friendlier Maemo
 

I agree that the vast majority of posters here go about it in a very civilized manner, but the few that don't create a lot of problems I think.

Perhaps the most worrying thing, to me at least, is where these types of uncivilized posts appear. In my, albeit rather limited, experience on this forum the majority of animosity is found on the threads posted by new users or most likely to be read by new, or prospective for that matter, users. That means that it has a discouraging effect for new people to join the community, which may be a big problem, especially if say Texrat is trying to get new developers on board and the first thing they see is animosity towards questions.

Re: Campaign for a Friendlier Maemo
 

F'king "A", bubba...

I see sub-forums now and that is a start. A lot could be eliminated if a simple "Phone related" forum with sub-fora was created. Then the mislabeled "rude, know-it-all, geek types" can avoid those posts altogether and hopefully specific Maemo 2, 3, 4, and 5 threads can carry on as they have in the past.

As far as political correctness goes, what works for me is to treat forums like a huge cocktail party.
There are some discussions you don't want to be a part of, some guests you enjoy being around no matter what is discussed, and other guests you try to avoid making eye contact with.

Within these conversations people will react pretty much the same on a forum or at a cocktail party. If someone wants to enter a conversation, people are generally polite and make them feel comfortable. If that new person tries to dominate the conversation or redirect it to one about themselves, or inject vitriol, unless they are Julia Roberts, most others will walk away to "freshen their drink" or something.

Since Julia hasn't showed up yet, I've been freshening my drink a lot lately. :D

Re: Campaign for a Friendlier Maemo
 

is there a possibility to add couple of links to talk front page?

http://wiki.maemo.org/New_users

http://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo_basics

http://wiki.maemo.org/Category:Beginners

I bet those plus users manual covers 80-90% questions asked.

It seems that having those at your signature doesn't help at all, one must first ask it and after some greeter has replied, he'll get the links.

Re: Campaign for a Friendlier Maemo
 

The majority of my postings are around the media or market and how the devices is being approached rather than how do i do X with my phone. But I have had that twice and when I PM'd or created a posting they were answered quickly and without sarcasm. On the PM response I went back to the relevant forum and posted a how to... Great huh! Well it would have been better if I or someone else had added it to the Wiki.

It is important to have phenomenal FAQ's and How-tos that will make life easier for newbies. (myself one of them).

One thing that may help is making the wiki more robust and easy to access. Maybe similar to how you query the forums for like posts run the query against the wiki. (like a google search of the site)

If someone were to put together a How-To template and encouraged people to build and submit (for review / testing) I think it could add a lot of value.

Re: Campaign for a Friendlier Maemo
 

It would definitely be a start, but I've worked selling electronics and dealing with end users, and you will still be asked the same questions over and over, it's pretty much unavoidable. But when you do, it's important to deal with them in as friendly a way as possible.

The good thing is that you learn a lot along the way and after while you'll be extremely proficient in dealing with these requests in a smooth and easy way.

It's not much fun though, sadly.

Re: Campaign for a Friendlier Maemo
 

One thing I don't like is how the Wiki is hidden. Heck I keep forgetting it exists once in a while. Perhaps there should be a Wiki/FAQ link on the forum itself.

Re: Campaign for a Friendlier Maemo
 

I think you are terribly wrong. Just mention the Iphone positively and you can crank up the number of flaming programmatically.

Else I totally agree to the creator of the thread.

Re: Campaign for a Friendlier Maemo
 

you are always going to have people that are passionate about something and you will always get little flamewars happening - we have 2 options that you might be familiar with:

Benevolent Dictator or Free Society.

• the Benevolent Dictator will review topics and remove the ones that don't or won't sit well with how they believe the forum should run.
• In the Free Society we love freedom that allows people to voice (dissenting) opinions and accept the responsibility that goes with it. This would create a self policing forum.

I prefer the free society but believe we need more self policing tools in order to grow as a community as our ranks continue to swell. There are a variety of ways to enable self policing and we can look at a number of models that currently exist with minimal supervision - a la craigslist.

Re: Campaign for a Friendlier Maemo
 

Agreed,

The problem is, that even if the wiki was in such a place that it stared someone dead smack in the face when they logged on, chances are, it wouldn't be used all that much by newcomers.

Some people nowadays would rather post a "Hey, dow do I turn my phone on" type question (I'm exaggerating, but you get the idea), instead of reading through a wiki in order to find their answers...

They don't bother to do a quick search before posting, what makes "us" think they'd bother reading some "silly" (in their eyes) wiki before asking their question.

Re: Campaign for a Friendlier Maemo
 

Not that I disagree with any particular point of this entire thread. But keep in mind when you use references like this.....

you got paid.