Also, I have noticed it has been really quiet here. Increasing the posting requirement may have a more chilling effect than you intended.
What are you trying to imply? Frankly, your comment implies that I should lower the donation threshold because I don't appear to be "busy".
Did you not read this post? My time is extremely limited due to family responsibilities. Now maybe you are blessed and do not have family members that need your direct intervention but I do.
Since my post was apparently not clear enough, I will be blunt: my family responsibilities are a far higher priority for me than NeoOffice support requests so the amount of support effort that I can provide is not negotiable.
Joined: Jun 11, 2006 Posts: 481 Location: Great Britain
Posted: Sun Oct 10, 2010 2:07 pm Post subject:
Hi Patrick,
I'm sure Oscar didn't mean to imply that you're not busy. I must admit I hadn't notice the post you linked to until now; let me belatedly offer my best wishes to you and your family, I hope all is as well as possible in your new circumstances.
Well, whatever Oscar's point was, his post reminded me of a problem that I have run into: since I am no longer spending all day every day working on NeoOffice, many hours (and sometimes more than day) may pass before I check the forums for new posts.
Since the point of raising the minimum donation amount was to provide some way for big donors a way to report critical bugs, I really need to get notified by e-mail when their is a post so that I don't miss it.
So I have tweaked our forum code and added a new "Notify me of all posts in any forums" option in the Profile page. By setting this setting to "Yes" (which Fran and I have done for our accounts), the forum software will e-mail you whenever anyone posts in any forum.
Hopefully others will find this notification feature useful.
What are you trying to imply? Frankly, your comment implies that I should lower the donation threshold because I don't appear to be "busy".
Did you not read this post? My time is extremely limited due to family responsibilities. Now maybe you are blessed and do not have family members that need your direct intervention but I do.
I am sorry Patrick, I meant no such thing. I am well aware of your posts, and you may recall I am only getting married next year and that my other direct family are either reasonably healthy or long dead.
I do, however, wonder about NeoOffice as a community, which it has been since I joined many years back. _________________ "What do you think of Western Civilization?"
"I think it would be a good idea!"
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
I do, however, wonder about NeoOffice as a community, which it has been since I joined many years back.
Communities grow and change over time, as do the things they're built around. Many years ago NeoOffice (and its underlying OpenOffice.org code) were much "rougher around the edges" and—when Patrick was not working consulting gigs to feed his family—every patch or week brought big changes, like printing, drag-and-drop, complex text support, or some nifty Aqua feature.
As time has gone by, the bugs in NeoOffice code have been steadily hammered out, so lots of the "alpha geeks" who liked getting new and dangerous stuff moved on. Likewise, those non-alpha geeks who were using bleeding edge software had less need for support (help with bugs, help with new features), and we codified a lot of the knowledge and FAQs (both philosophical/technical, as well as the practical "how do I do foo") in the wiki, the User Guide, and Gabriel Gurley's book.
As a concrete example, it used to be when someone reported a bug, I was bound to run into it shortly. Recently (for the past year+), though, most bugs that Patrick has fixed are things that I wasn't sure how to even reproduce after reading the bug over a few times (or required some specialized software setup).
Things still get more active when there's an upgrade to newer NeoOffice code, or there's a new NeoOffice feature being integrated, but most of the time NeoOffice is a well-oiled machine that needs little intervention.
That's not to say that the forum would still be relatively low-traffic if Patrick had not implemented (and later raised) donation levels for posting; I'm sure we'd have lots of spam and lots of users who need help figuring out how to do task x. But given the time and financial constraints and circumstances that affect pretty much everyone (many of the once-regular posters slowly began "disappearing" a couple years ago) now, the donation levels are the only way to keep the balance between available resources and NeoOffice's well-deserved reputation for quick fixes to important bugs.
Anyway, I've sort of lost the thread of what I started out to say, which is that NeoOffice itself is a much different—more mature, and more stable—piece of software now than it was some years ago when people like us first arrived, and that a good part of the shift in the state and "feeling" of the community reflects that (and also, as Lorinda often mentions, the loss of Jacqueline, who was a bright light here that will never be replaced).
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
I think it's also reasonable to assume that this website is getting a lot of use from people who visit it to get questions answered - and then get their questions answered simply by searching the extensive array of posts that are on here now (as well as through the wiki), and therefore have no need to ask their original question out loud. This site and its existing posts is a bloody good resource in its own right these days .
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