Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Wednesday October 25 2017, @05:15AM   Printer-friendly
from the changing-your-point-of-view dept.

Snoyberg's The Do's and Don't's of Running an Open Source Project:

Real title should be: how to get members of any open source community to be interested in helping you. But the given title is catchier.

There's an old "ha ha, only serious" joke. If you go to a Linux forum and ask for help fixing your WiFi driver, everyone will ignore you. If, instead, you say "Linux sucks, you can't even get a f*&$ing WiFi driver working!" thousands of people will solve the problem for you.

This story is a great example of manipulating people, but it's obviously a negative take on it. I'd like to share some thoughts on this from a much more positive standpoint, which will help you get people to pay more attention, be more helpful, and—perhaps most importantly—create a healthier open source community over all.

These items will appear in no particular order, and will almost all fall into either the attractor or obstacle category. An attractor is something you can do to make people want to participate with you. An obstacle is something you should not do, which would prevent people from interacting with you.

And it should go without saying, but I'll say it anyway: this is an opinionated list, written by one guy. I'm including in here things that I personally care about, and things which friends and colleagues have shared with me. No example is specific to any individual, so don't think I'm calling you out: I'm most certainly not. And some people may disagree, or have other items for this list. Sharing such differing thoughts would be very healthy.

The list:

  • Don't waste people's time
  • Demonstrate you've tried
  • Help other people
  • Don't be rude
  • Say thank you
  • Admit if you're new
  • Offer to help
  • Give money

Saying, "Lennart Poettering sucks" is not on the list of recommendations.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by MrGuy on Wednesday October 25 2017, @11:24AM (1 child)

    by MrGuy (1007) on Wednesday October 25 2017, @11:24AM (#587326)

    OK, if you're running a project that's only expected to be used by professional programmers, a lot of this is good advice. And don't get me wrong - despite what I'm putting in the rest of this post, I agree the world would be a better place if people asking for help on forums followed all of these pieces of advice.

    But if you're building a tool that's intended for a non-professional audience (linux would be a great example, but there are plenty of allegedly "consumer-grade" open source products), then the whole approach is well-meaning but backwards. It's trying to fix the customers, instead of acknowledging the level and functionality of support that's available is a problem. Volunteer support through forums is a really poor option to have be your best support option if your product is aimed at non-techies. And most support forums have a nasty streak that's really, really offputting.

    You need to look at changing how you offer support before expecting to "fix" your customers.

    Most non-professional-techie consumers just want things to work. If they don't work, they want it to be as easy as possible to get to a working state. They want to simply ask someone and be told the answer. That is not an inherently unreasonable expectation.

    Have you ever heard what support calls to professional software companies sound like? They violate a heck of a lot of these rules. You can get support even if you express frustration. They will help you even if you haven't exhausted every resource available to you and spent an hour trying to fix the problem on your own. They will help you even if you're new to the software. Scratch that - ESPECIALLY if you're new to the software - they won't condescend to the inexperienced.

    Are people sometimes less helpful than they could be to professional support organizations? Sure. Is that a good thing? No. But not helping people because they don't fit into a box that indicated that they're "worthy" of help means you'll never rise above being a niche product.

    Having to ask on a forum is already a frustrating experience - there's nobody who can help me fix the problem right now, but if I leave a message here MAYBE someone will read it and help me, but no guarantees. That is a massively frustrating thing to find is your only support option. Sure, expressing that frustration in your post is not a great idea, but it's understandable.

    "Don't waste people's time?" What's "wasting their time?" When a person has a problem, it's the only problem they care about. They don't think asking for help is wasting someone's time. Should they read the FAQ first and search the forums? Sure. But it's illustrative of the problem that helping someone is seen as "wasting time" if the person in theory could have solve it themselves. The example above with the "my wifi driver doesn't work" is a great example. Hey, your computer has a Broadcom model 27b/6 wifi adapter, and there's a previous forum post from 9 months ago that said there's a known bug with those and gave steps to fix it. Oh, you didn't know your wifi adapter was a 27b/6? There's a pinned topic that tells you how to check with make and model your adapter is. You didn't read the entire forum to find those two posts, or didn't know how to search for it? You didn't try the manual workaround from 9 months ago that has you hack a bunch of deep magic settings that you don't understand and wouldn't be able to change back if you make a mistake (and possibly trash your system) on the hope that the workaround is still valid? Why are you wasting my time by daring to ask the question again?

    Someone earlier mentioned "don't tell me your life story," but also said you shouldn't stop at "it doesn't work." OK, but where the stopping point is between those two extremes isn't obvious to everyone. Expecting non-technical folks to understand what's relevant and what isn't for support is basically expecting them all to BE technical. It's not clear how many details they should expect to include about what their system is and what they're trying to do. "Hi, folks, I'm hoping someone can help me with a WiFi problem. I have a two-year-old Dell Smallbook that I bought at a garage sale that had Microsoft Bob on it when I bought it. I downloaded the iso images from SuperSlack's website and I installed SuperSlack 3.0 from the CD drive. The machine booted and I successfully created a root login and personal logins for me, my girlfriend, and my cat. I can get FreeOffice and other installed apps to run. I can connect to the internet with an ethernet cable. But I can't get the wifi to work - I can see the available networks, but it won't connect to my home network."

    The above almost certainly contains some irrelevant details (it used to have Microsoft Bob installed, I installed from the CD drive), and it's certainly missing some relevant ones (what's the error? Have you tried any other wifi networks?) I get why this would be a frustrating bug report. But this is how the user thinks about their problem, and expressing frustration at THEM for not editing out the "irrelevant parts" as well as not recognizing the "important parts" will 1.) turn them off from your support channel as useful, and 2.) likely turn them off from your software.

    Again, offering support on forums would be a lot better experience for both the person with a problem and the person offering help if the customers were more savvy, more helpful, and knew what to ask. But EXPECTING them to do so as a precondition for them being able to get help for real problems they're having is a sure-fire way to ensure you never have a lot of non-technical users.

    I'm lifting the following from Shamus Young's [shamusyoung.com] website - I think it's a pitch-perfect example of the kind of experience many people have on support forums:

    ALLEN: Hi, I’m new to driving and I need to move my car back around 5 meters. How can I move the car backwards?

    (2 days later.)

    ALLEN: Hello? This is still a problem. I’m sure someone knows how to do this.

    BOB: I can’t believe you didn’t figure this out yourself. Just take your foot off the gas and let the car roll backwards down the hill. Tap the bake when you get to where you want to be. Boom. Done.

    ALLEN: But I’m not on a hill. I’m in my driveway and it’s completely flat.

    CARL: Dude, I don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish, but you should never be driving backwards. It’s dangerous and will confuse the other drivers. See the big window in FRONT of you? That’s your first clue. Don’t drive backwards.

    ALLEN: I’m not trying to drive backwards. I just need to move back a little bit so I can get out of my driveway and start driving forwards.

    CARL: So just drive in circle until you’re pointed the right way.

    ALLEN: I don’t have enough room to turn around like that. I only need to move back a few meters. I don’t understand why this has to be so hard.

    CARL: Sounds like your “driveway” isn’t compatible with cars. It’s probably made for bikes. Call a contractor and have them convert some of your yard into driveway to be standards-compliant with the turning radius of a car. Either way, you’re doing something wrong.

    DAVE: I see your problem. You can adjust your car to move backwards by using the shifter. It’s a stick located right between the passenger and driver seats. Apply the clutch and move the stick to the “R” position.

    ALLEN: But.. I don’t have a clutch. And there isn’t a stick between the seats.

    CARL: Sounds like you’re trying to drive in Europe or something.

    ALLEN: Ah. Nevermind. I figured it out.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +3  
       Insightful=2, Funny=1, Total=3
    Extra 'Insightful' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   5  
  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 25 2017, @05:40PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 25 2017, @05:40PM (#587461)

    The worst part of that exchange for me is the "ALLEN: Ah. Nevermind. I figured it out." Sure, Allen got frustrated because no one was offering him a solution so was short to kill the thread. But now when someone (maybe even him) have the same problem later, the solution isn't there. And, more frustrating sometimes, the new person with the same problem also knows that there is apparently a solution out there but they might not ever know what it is.