[TYPO3-UG US] ... from New York

[Michelle Heizer]

Hi John,

Nice to see a New York presence on the list. :)

On Wed, 2005-10-12 at 12:42 -0400, John Romano wrote:
> You must be referring to the poor English because:
>    1) I don't have any way to bring back the  support system.
>    2) I did not have access to help fix the search engine.  who knows
> if 
> I might have.
>    3) I am not a psychologist, so fixing bad 'RTFM' attitudes is also 
> not possible.

These are very good points and something we need to work on as a
community. TYPO3 exploded a little while back and the community grew
exponentially. I think you will find that people are still struggling
with how to handle this growth. I know there were problems with the
instability of typo3.org and the massive amounts of documentation and
hits it was getting. No one anticipated the traffic it would receive and
so it's a big concern to keep the site running properly. But you are
right, we need to focus on our users. With two vital sources of
information missing or incomplete (online mailing list and search), we
have to think about what we can do to accommodate people until this gets
fixed.

This, of course, leads to your last point and it's not the first time
I've heard about the mailing list and the 'RTFM' attitude. It especially
bothers me because we were all newbies once and should never forget
that. For myself, something that seems so simple now, might have taken
me hours to figure out when I first used TYPO3. Sometimes it just takes
a bit of help to get over a hurdle (or two!) before you can really get
into the 'mindset' of TYPO3. :) 

Communication is always a challenge in such a large project. Maybe we
need to discuss and offer suggestions on what we'd like to see added to
support developers, whether it be on a US portal or on TYPO3.org.


Michelle