6 ms·

Open-Source Release Practices (2013)

51 points by generichuman 8y ago

CM30 8y ago
Some good points here, though a couple are outdated too. For instance, I'm not sure I'd recommend mailing lists in 2018, since they're simply less convenient for the average user than a good forum might be. That said, one extra piece of advice that should be added for a future version of a list like this is as follows: Do not use a chat system as your only support channel. Seriously. Things like Slack, Discord (and open alternatives like Riot) are not good systems for support forums, or any sort of community that should be visible by the public. They make it impossible to find answers with search engines like Google, impossible for archiving services to back them up in case things go down and force users to register to simply find any help given to others. They're terrible systems for this purpose, and should not be used as a primary support channel for a project. That's another piece of advice for such lists right there.
- xjia 8y ago
  I guess Google Groups or Discourse should work fine for modern age average users ;-) The ability to work without a browser still means a lot to some of us.
  - kingosticks 8y ago
    Couldn't you just borrow someone's Web browser and configure Discourse to send you emails for everything that's posted?
    - xjia 8y ago
      That's exactly why I proposed the two products. Other forums do not support emails as good.
- dwheeler 8y ago
  > I'm not sure I'd recommend mailing lists in 2018, since they're simply less convenient for the average user than a good forum might be. I would definitely recommend mailing lists in 2018, because they're much more convenient for the average user than a forum. If a user is extremely interested in a single project, then specialized software makes sense. But most people have lives beyond the single project - a mailing list makes it easy to funnel all that stuff into one place. Google groups and similar make it quite easy to set one up.
  - lmm 8y ago
    > If a user is extremely interested in a single project, then specialized software makes sense. But most people have lives beyond the single project - a mailing list makes it easy to funnel all that stuff into one place. This is backwards. Unless someone is deeply involved in a single project, they don't want to sign up to a mailing list and have it flood their inbox (yes, I'm sure you have a sophisticated filtering system that separates out mailing list messages, but typical users don't). Yes you don't want to require users to install a custom executable, but a web forum that uses one of the handful of familiar packages for such will work great.
    - berti 8y ago
      It really depends on the types of people you wish to attract. Obviously this is very subjective but I've always found mailing list discussions to be of noticeably higher quality than forum discussions. If your topic is a technical one then a mailing list makes sense, whereas a support area for average Joe really wants to be a forum (actually, Facebook groups seem to have taken over a lot of the area previously carved out by forums, and the standard of discourse is lower again).
      - u801e 8y ago
        A lot of web forums lack proper threading implementation (other than a flat thread descended from the original post). Hacker News and reddit do implement threads, but make it difficult to see new posts when you refresh (though reddit does mark them if you have "reddit gold").
- saagarjha 8y ago
  Swift recently moved from a mailing list to a forum (Discourse). Honestly I'm not sure I prefer it. Sure, we get niceties like better search and Markdown formatting, but those only really work if you use the website, which breaks often (especially when it tries to do things like track clicks). So now I have to keep a tab open for the forums, which I really dislike as opposed to the native, more performant, and more customizable experience Mail gives me.
- meddlepal 8y ago
  > Do not use a chat system as your only support channel. I disagree. We've found Slack and Gitter to be the easiest and most effective way to communicate with our users. At least for troubleshooting and diagnosis. Even our paid users love that we setup a private Slack channel for communication with us on-demand. If we identify a big enough issue then it becomes a GitHub issue. So many support requests are one-off "How to do X?" They're usually softball questions or good points for us to interact with our users about pain. So what if folks can't self service their issue? Providing excellent on-demand customer support and responses is really valuable from the perspective of showing you care about your users and building a relationship. It's often through that communication we learn interesting new things about usecases for our software too.
  - slaymaker1907 8y ago
    But if you answer it in a chat, you are going to have to answer it in that chat multiple times. At least with an issue tracker, you can search through the old issues pretty easily.
    - meddlepal 8y ago
      If we answer it enough times it's an indicator to fix our documentation. Also, often times the reason someone is asking something leads to learning useful stuff about the problem. The downside is repetition, but we invest in doc improvement to avoid that too much. The upside is personalized support which really means building trust with our users and also really trying to understand what they're trying to accomplish. Yea it has overhead but you just build that into your operations. In the long run we probably will start adding things like a Knowledge Base or using other support mechanisms but we've found so far that chat based support is very effective. Anecdotal. YMMV, etc.
    - antpls 8y ago
      There are 2 sides : the customer/user side and the business side. Instant chats are a rather good experience on the user side, but it is more work on the business side (for now). As a customer, I used chat support to ask about information or support both on open-source projects and on profit-oriented businesses, and it's generally a good experience. As a paying customer, however, I feel like chat is not enough, especially if your issue is complex and requires several days to fix. Then the ticket system is better to have visibility as a customer. The underlying idea with chat is that you can first orient people with a conversational bot (name it as you want : a personal assistant, an expert system for searching in stack overflow) that will help them on frequent issues, and then redirect them to an human when the bot's knowledge is not enough. If you have a specific question, the conversational agent will look into different sources of knowledge (forum, documentations, stack overflow, even Google) and do the searches for the customer. It's like an interactive search session for the customer without having to navigate into different platforms and read a lot of text. Chat experience should only get better with improvements in NLP in the future.

51 points by generichuman 8y ago

CM30 8y ago

Some good points here, though a couple are outdated too. For instance, I'm not sure I'd recommend mailing lists in 2018, since they're simply less convenient for the average user than a good forum might be. That said, one extra piece of advice that should be added for a future version of a list like this is as follows: Do not use a chat system as your only support channel. Seriously. Things like Slack, Discord (and open alternatives like Riot) are not good systems for support forums, or any sort of community that should be visible by the public. They make it impossible to find answers with search engines like Google, impossible for archiving services to back them up in case things go down and force users to register to simply find any help given to others. They're terrible systems for this purpose, and should not be used as a primary support channel for a project. That's another piece of advice for such lists right there.

xjia 8y ago
I guess Google Groups or Discourse should work fine for modern age average users ;-) The ability to work without a browser still means a lot to some of us.
- kingosticks 8y ago
  Couldn't you just borrow someone's Web browser and configure Discourse to send you emails for everything that's posted?
  - xjia 8y ago
    That's exactly why I proposed the two products. Other forums do not support emails as good.
dwheeler 8y ago
> I'm not sure I'd recommend mailing lists in 2018, since they're simply less convenient for the average user than a good forum might be. I would definitely recommend mailing lists in 2018, because they're much more convenient for the average user than a forum. If a user is extremely interested in a single project, then specialized software makes sense. But most people have lives beyond the single project - a mailing list makes it easy to funnel all that stuff into one place. Google groups and similar make it quite easy to set one up.
- lmm 8y ago
  > If a user is extremely interested in a single project, then specialized software makes sense. But most people have lives beyond the single project - a mailing list makes it easy to funnel all that stuff into one place. This is backwards. Unless someone is deeply involved in a single project, they don't want to sign up to a mailing list and have it flood their inbox (yes, I'm sure you have a sophisticated filtering system that separates out mailing list messages, but typical users don't). Yes you don't want to require users to install a custom executable, but a web forum that uses one of the handful of familiar packages for such will work great.
  - berti 8y ago
    It really depends on the types of people you wish to attract. Obviously this is very subjective but I've always found mailing list discussions to be of noticeably higher quality than forum discussions. If your topic is a technical one then a mailing list makes sense, whereas a support area for average Joe really wants to be a forum (actually, Facebook groups seem to have taken over a lot of the area previously carved out by forums, and the standard of discourse is lower again).
    - u801e 8y ago
      A lot of web forums lack proper threading implementation (other than a flat thread descended from the original post). Hacker News and reddit do implement threads, but make it difficult to see new posts when you refresh (though reddit does mark them if you have "reddit gold").
saagarjha 8y ago
Swift recently moved from a mailing list to a forum (Discourse). Honestly I'm not sure I prefer it. Sure, we get niceties like better search and Markdown formatting, but those only really work if you use the website, which breaks often (especially when it tries to do things like track clicks). So now I have to keep a tab open for the forums, which I really dislike as opposed to the native, more performant, and more customizable experience Mail gives me.
meddlepal 8y ago
> Do not use a chat system as your only support channel. I disagree. We've found Slack and Gitter to be the easiest and most effective way to communicate with our users. At least for troubleshooting and diagnosis. Even our paid users love that we setup a private Slack channel for communication with us on-demand. If we identify a big enough issue then it becomes a GitHub issue. So many support requests are one-off "How to do X?" They're usually softball questions or good points for us to interact with our users about pain. So what if folks can't self service their issue? Providing excellent on-demand customer support and responses is really valuable from the perspective of showing you care about your users and building a relationship. It's often through that communication we learn interesting new things about usecases for our software too.
- slaymaker1907 8y ago
  But if you answer it in a chat, you are going to have to answer it in that chat multiple times. At least with an issue tracker, you can search through the old issues pretty easily.
  - meddlepal 8y ago
    If we answer it enough times it's an indicator to fix our documentation. Also, often times the reason someone is asking something leads to learning useful stuff about the problem. The downside is repetition, but we invest in doc improvement to avoid that too much. The upside is personalized support which really means building trust with our users and also really trying to understand what they're trying to accomplish. Yea it has overhead but you just build that into your operations. In the long run we probably will start adding things like a Knowledge Base or using other support mechanisms but we've found so far that chat based support is very effective. Anecdotal. YMMV, etc.
  - antpls 8y ago
    There are 2 sides : the customer/user side and the business side. Instant chats are a rather good experience on the user side, but it is more work on the business side (for now). As a customer, I used chat support to ask about information or support both on open-source projects and on profit-oriented businesses, and it's generally a good experience. As a paying customer, however, I feel like chat is not enough, especially if your issue is complex and requires several days to fix. Then the ticket system is better to have visibility as a customer. The underlying idea with chat is that you can first orient people with a conversational bot (name it as you want : a personal assistant, an expert system for searching in stack overflow) that will help them on frequent issues, and then redirect them to an human when the bot's knowledge is not enough. If you have a specific question, the conversational agent will look into different sources of knowledge (forum, documentations, stack overflow, even Google) and do the searches for the customer. It's like an interactive search session for the customer without having to navigate into different platforms and read a lot of text. Chat experience should only get better with improvements in NLP in the future.