OK, people have been calling for a wiki for a while now. But a wiki isn't exactly what we need. What we need is a knowledge base, a collection of articles about things like false positives and apps that can't be made portable.
We have all the infrastructure in place. We have forums that don't show up in the index (e.g. Open Source Releases) and we have forums whose posts don't show up in the Tracker (Off-Topic). So what we do is, we make a forum that has both of those attributes, and we call it Knowledge Base. We grant topic creation privileges to a select few, like John, Chris, anybody else with a lot of computer/portable app knowledge and technical writing skills (I would like to think I could help with this).
We establish, for example in this topic if we're gonna do it, what topics should be priority, and write those first, each topic (e.g. False Positives) getting its own article. We allow comments, but either moderated or regularly pruned (like the Outdated Official Apps topic).
Maybe we can prioritize searches on the site so they search the Knowledge Base forum first.
Down the road, regular members can keep a bookmark folder somewhere with links to certain articles, so they can quickly post links when questions come up. Because no matter how much information you put up there, people will always make a new topic just to get that personal response.
Oh, and I suggest de-linking this proposed forum from the forum index and the tracker, because in either place it would encourage discussion, and we would want the general public to only read these, as they wouldn't be discussions, per se.
Thoughts?
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I like this idea. The only thing I would add is that there should be some process for members to request that something be added (after review and approval) to the knowledge base, such as detailed information about a specific program or a newly-found false positive.
SWAG
Various things along these lines are available in the support section, such as a discussion of false positives. Adjusting the search weighting is something I've thought vaguely about a couple of times and think could be a good idea.
Concerning more technical things, I'm planning on working on that myself, turning the PortableApps.com Launcher manual into a general PortableApps.com development manual. I'll see how I go with it; currently I'm getting sidetracked with another secret PortableApps.com project.
(Technical side note: also, Open Source Releases is not a type of forum topic - it's just part of the clever and very useful "blurring" of content types in Drupal. All content types share the same structure, they can just be tweaked slightly to handle slightly different things, with the ability to allow a forum taxonomy tags to appear in the forum, options to enable or disable comments, et cetera.)
I am a Christian and a developer and moderator here.
“A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.” – Proverbs 15:1
OMG OMG Tell me what it is
JK. Seriously but I can't help but be curious...
PortableApps.com Advocate
I am a Christian and a developer and moderator here.
“A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.” – Proverbs 15:1
I support this idea. I like Chris's idea of putting it all in a manual in which I'd suggest having built in to the menu. However as had been demonstrated time and again, many, many users do not refer to helps/manuals (I have been guilty on multiple occasions). They look for info online (I blame Microsoft for the hopeless responses they give when using Office 2007 help functions :p).
As much as I personally dislike duplication and count it as inefficient, I think it would be good to have the proposed manual duplicated into an online knowledge base. The online knowledge base would be regularly update through user feedback. Then as each time the platform is updated it could incorporate the changes made in the knowledge base to the manual.
What do you think?
PortableApps.com Advocate