Versiontracker

[Ouija]

Good morning all,

Dedicated NeoOffice user here and have been getting as many folks as I can to give NeoOffice a try so far everyone has loved it!

I was thinking that it might be helpful to post the patches that are released on versiontracker.com under NeoOffice. I know we get an e-mail that's sent out but I know lots of user's who would be apt to see the patches if they were listed on Versiontacker. I also think that every time one is listed NeoOffice would then be re-listed as something new and even more people would see it and possibly try it.

Just a thought! NeoOffice is a great program and THE alternative to MS Office.

Thanks,

Bob

[Guest]

Sounds like a great idea to me, and I would suggest and/or on the site macupdate.com as well/instead.

The owners are very finicky re: duistribuiton however so they may not go for this. Talk about a megashot turbo boost exposure idea though...

[sardisson]

We did this a very long, long time ago, and it was quite a lot of work staying on top of things (and, as always, we had problems with VT and MU), and I'm not keen on doing it again.

You'd get in situations like this 30 times a year instead of 4: Patrick releases an update. Before we can update our listing, a VT/MU user has submitted a "new update available" message to the VT/MU system (or the VT/MU "be the first to announce updates" automated scraping system notices an update), so they update our listing to include only the new version number. VT/MU users see the update and complain "Why did the NeoOffice folks post an update without telling us what changed? They're annoying and stupid." and so forth, until we've updated VT/MU's forced update and their databases have refreshed, never knowing that it was VT/MU who pushed an update, not us. And then there's the whole "link to the (PPC) binaries instead of the download page/patch page" and then users start pasting links directly to mirrors, and so forth. And having the download links be useful both to new people who discover Neo (they need the full binary for their platform, plus the latest patch) and to people who only need the patch, and so forth....

It's an obnoxious, painful mess. It's tolerable 4x a year for the major releases because those are staged and have a set release date in advance, and I can develop a list of changes in advance, and so forth. But none of those things work for patches.

This sort of flies in the face of common expectations, but Patrick has mentioned before the goal of NeoOffice is not to increase its userbase but to be the best Mac port of OpenOffice.org there is. That requires not lots of users, but rather a greater percentage of donating users....

If someone posted some hard evidence that patches-on-update-sites translated into more donations for NeoOffice development, I'd think about doing it again. Until then, there's no real compelling reason, and lots, lots of pain.

Smokey

[Ouija]

Thanks Smokey,

I never thought what a pain it might be to stay on top of everything. However I'd be happy to volunteer some time to do some updating on VT and MU if you want. I do think that more users = more donations because the well you tap from is larger so I'd be happy to do what I can. Let me know.

Bob