Hi Daniel. On Wed, 2008-08-20 at 01:23 -0400, Daniel Hollocher wrote: > I started a project on launchpad, and I'm pretty sure that I'm > subscribed to bugs by default. Additionally, since its just me on the > project, I have no need for these features. Launchpad encourages the development of communities by encouraging users to contribute to your project when the opportunity arises. You are not obligated to be the Bug Contact or the Answer Contact. Other users may choose to take these roles. Only you can appoint an official Bug Contact, but any user can choose to subscribe to all your project's bugs or become an Answer Contact. This happens for many projects. > It sounds like that the Answers section is a feature designed for > large projects. It would nice to be able to turn it off for smaller > projects, and have it off as the default for new projects. That way, > once the maintainer figures out who that person wants to be a question > answerer, Answers can be turned back on. Thats just me. You can state whether your project officially uses Launchpad Answers by edit your project's details. Deselect "People can ask questions in Launchpad Answers" and you will see that Answers is removed from the "Uses Launchpad for" section on the project overview page. Even if your project does not officially use Launchpad Answers, users may have questions, and other users may choose to provide answers. Launchpad Answers is multi-lingual. Even if none of the project's core contributors can read Arabic, a user can ask a question in Arabic, and an Arabic-literate user can provide an answer. "Official" means that the core project contributors recognise Launchpad Answers as the preferred way to answer user questions; they still rely on volunteers to help answer questions. > On a larger note, there are a growing number of support options out > there, and its confusing which ones to use, and when. There are > mailing lists, IRC, the launchpad answers section, google, > ubuntu.forums, the wiki, and I know some guys who are coding up a new > support tool. Indeed. I would also add that a great answer for version 1 of a project may not be relevant for version 2. Each project needs to choose the option that makes supporting user easy. Forums and mailing lists are adhoc solutions for support, and are chosen because they are both simple and familiar. Their weakness is that they are not specific to support, they are communication tools. The same is true for IRC. Launchpad Answers is designed to help users get answers to their questions. It uses the Web like a forum, but Answer Contacts can choose to use email like a list to communicate. Answer Contact can create FAQs to answer user questions before they are asked. Questions can be linked to FAQs and to bugs as needed. User often ask questions that are about related projects; a question can be moved to the relevant project that can provide an answer. > I also used to use a site, ubuntuguide.org, which is possibly being > cannibalized by the wiki. > > I personally find all these options confusing, and I hope that a wider > discussion takes place in the future, that takes all these into > account. > > Take care, > Dan -- __Curtis C. Hovey_________ http://launchpad.net/
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