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NeoOffice :: View topic - New requirement for obtaining NeoWiki accounts
New requirement for obtaining NeoWiki accounts
 
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sardisson
Town Crier
Town Crier


Joined: Feb 01, 2004
Posts: 4588

PostPosted: Wed Sep 02, 2009 11:43 am    Post subject: New requirement for obtaining NeoWiki accounts

Due to the rash of human spam attacking trinity (and our much more limited attention to the NeoWiki, whose users have largely been vetted through participation in the past), effective immediately I will not be approving new NeoWiki accounts from trinity users who have not made an effort to participate in the trinity forums with quality contributions. (This has been a loose, unofficial policy of mine for a while, but I'm stating it and making it "official" now.)

I understand that this might inconvenience some potential new wiki contributors, particularly interested translators, but since most of the wiki communication happens via trinity, it's important that potential editors be part of this community (and there are simple ways for potential translators to participate in a manner consistent with their intentions).

If no one objects to this change strenuously, I hope Fran will also adopt this policy for any account requests that come her way. (I have already noted this change on the New User page, but I will remove it if there are significant objections.

Smokey

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"[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
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narf
The Anomaly


Joined: Jan 21, 2007
Posts: 1075

PostPosted: Wed Sep 02, 2009 12:46 pm    Post subject: Re: New requirement for obtaining NeoWiki accounts

sardisson wrote:
I hope Fran will also adopt this policy for any account requests that come her way. (I have already noted this change on the New User page, but I will remove it if there are significant objections.


Smokey,

This policy makes sense to me and I will adopt it. Thanks for updating the NeoWiki.

--fran
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pluby
The Architect
The Architect


Joined: Jun 16, 2003
Posts: 11949

PostPosted: Wed Sep 02, 2009 12:47 pm    Post subject: Re: New requirement for obtaining NeoWiki accounts

sardisson wrote:
Due to the rash of human spam attacking trinity (and our much more limited attention to the NeoWiki, whose users have largely been vetted through participation in the past), effective immediately I will not be approving new NeoWiki accounts from trinity users who have not made an effort to participate in the trinity forums with quality contributions. (This has been a loose, unofficial policy of mine for a while, but I'm stating it and making it "official" now.)


I agree with this completely.

While some might argue that this discourages volunteers, our experience under the past looser policy is that only a handful of new NeoOffice volunteers show up on Trinity or NeoWiki each year. And of those new volunteers, we are lucky if one of those volunteers answers support questions in the NeoOffice Support forum.

Essentially, no matter how much our non-donating user base grows and no matter how much more load on our IT infrastructure (and maintenance time) grows, we still our handling over 90% of the workload with only a handful of people. Even worse, the donations that fund the parts that NeoOffice volunteers cannot do - NeoOffice development and IT infrastructure maintenance - have been steadily declining.

I don't claim to know what is driving the steady increase. Maybe the global economic crisis is part of the cause. Or maybe the popularity of applications like Firefox and Facebook that are funded by large corporate grants or ads has caused many users to believe that providing free software costs nearly nothing. Whatever the cause, I don't doubt that our situation is unique and I would not be surprised if OpenOffice.org and Go-oo.org are finding increasing pressure from their corporate sponsors and donors to work with less.

Whatever the cause, the reality is that times have been rapidly changing in the past year and I will be blunt: how we operate the NeoOffice project will have to change. We will continue to provide free downloads as over 90% of our downloads are served by volunteer mirrors so that is not where we need to change anything.

What must change in the coming year is how will allocate our very tiny team of people. While I have not had time to implement anything yet, Ed, I, and Fran are strongly leaning towards increasingly restricting support requests to people who donate more than a trivial amount.

We don't want to do anything drastic, but office suites are a support intensive product and we cannot afford to provide the support that our non-donors clearly want. Because of this, everyone should expect that we will increasingly restrict where non-donors can post and to more directly state that non-donors should not expect any support for our site. We can leave a forum open, but non-donors will find that their non-donor support forum will slowly migrate down below the NeoOffice and NeoOffice Mobile donor forums.

What will this do for us? I hope that it will free up some time for Fran and I to actually stop working 7 days a week until 10:00 at night. Our current lifestyle is unsustainable and unhealthy and since our non-donors have no collective constraints on their use of our free support resources, we must impose them ourselves until balance is achieved.

Until balance is achieved again (and that has not existed for at least the last 3 years for me and nearly 2 years for Fran), what we provide for free will be increasingly restricted.

I don't mean to sound negative, but we have finite resources and since the global economic crises started in mid-2008, we have steadily been moving to towards the point where the NeoOffice project is no longer sustainable and since OpenOffice.org really hasn't taken any signficant amount of our support load away, we must do what we can to ensure that we don't consume all our limited financial resources and people trying to maintain a level of service that we cannot possibly sustain.

Patrick
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sardisson
Town Crier
Town Crier


Joined: Feb 01, 2004
Posts: 4588

PostPosted: Wed Sep 02, 2009 4:38 pm    Post subject:

Would it help on your end if you and Fran made a conscious effort not to reply to support posts as quickly (or at least ones not specifically about crashes/hangs)?

Lots of times I visit trinity and find that the support posts have all been answered by you or Fran (and other volunteers, certainly, but lots of times it's all pluby/narf), even when it's still very early in the morning in CA Wink

I understand that in many cases there's a benefit (goodwill, and perhaps a new/additional donation) from the amazing support turn-around time NeoOffice has, but there's also a significant cost to your lives/sanity/health, too. Obviously only you and Fran can make that calculation, but in light of the information you revealed in the last post I wanted to point out this possible option.

Smokey

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"[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
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pluby
The Architect
The Architect


Joined: Jun 16, 2003
Posts: 11949

PostPosted: Wed Sep 02, 2009 7:21 pm    Post subject:

sardisson wrote:
Would it help on your end if you and Fran made a conscious effort not to reply to support posts as quickly (or at least ones not specifically about crashes/hangs)?


I appreciate your ideas, but you know we already have been doing this since early July. I really don't think your suggestion is for me. Maybe it is for Fran, but not me. Bear with me and I will explain why below.

It is easy to forget that neooffice.org is essentially a virtual place of business. It may seem like it runs itself, but we have all of the same problems and worries that a brick and mortar company has like, will we be able to pay for the servers and our health insurance this month?

Now I never expected NeoOffice to make me rich (and Fran and I certainly would be better off working as employees somewhere else) and we have apparently been able to not go broke while running NeoOffice over the last 7 years, but you must realize that after this much time running NeoOffice is like running a small business: it involves long work hours and lots of financial risk. Maybe some people will be surprised to learn that very little of our work is fun or even interesting but we do it because we have pride in our product and our work.

So why can't I just ignore non-donor posts? The answer is because our personal lives are now dependent on NeoOffice's successful operations. I don't know about others, but when my ability to get paid each month is dependent on whether or not people donate, I am very sensitive to all support requests, comments, and donations that we receive each day.

Based on the combination of positive feedback that I get from daily donation receipts and answers to support requests and translations from NeoOffice volunteers and the negative feedback from non-donor support requests that really boil down to "NeoOffice is broken because it does not work the way I expect it to so help me", I am constantly trying to gauge whether or not NeoOffice is going to be able to cover our bills 6 months or a year from now.

During 2006 and 2007, positive feedback was very high compared to the negative feedback. However, since mid-2008, the same level of negative feedback but the positive feedback has steadily been draining away.

So, from our perspective, ignoring the negative feedback is not realistic. Given how constant it has been, it is clear that a certain percentage of people want personalized computer support or an exact Microsoft Office clone at no cost. While we cannot whip up code or hire staff to make such people happy, what we can do is stop encouraging them to push their negative feedback onto our site.

I know that may sound harsh, but we have had tons of warnings, disclaimers, tutorials, articles, etc. yet there are still a steady stream of non-donors who ignore all that and are surprised to find that NeoOffice does not work as they would have designed it or is not a perfect replica of Microsoft Office.

Frankly, the business side of me keeps saying that the ever worsening ratio of positive to negative feedback really is the sign that NeoOffice's good years are over. However, the engineer side of me says that I should try whatever means I can afford to do to correct the situation.

For now, I am still listening to my engineer side and so changing our site to make the time to post negative feedback higher than the cost for those users to find the answer on their own by searching and reading seems to be a reasonable course of action.

Patrick
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ovvldc
Captain Naiobi


Joined: Sep 13, 2004
Posts: 2352
Location: Zürich, CH

PostPosted: Wed Sep 02, 2009 11:18 pm    Post subject:

I think it is also a matter of getting closer in look and functionality to commercial office suites:

If your software is very different, people are immediately put in the mindset of the software being different and adjust their expectations.

If your software is almost the same, people don't adjust and merely expect everything to work the way it used to.

The same happens when you switch to a new version of Windows (not so much in Mac OS X, fortunately).

In this sense, you are a victim of your own succes. What worries me more is that you personally seem to be growing tired of NeoOffice. It might be worth investigating if you can substantially reduce your hours spent on NeoOffice for a few months. Never mind if some issues remain unsolved for a while (there aren't that many crashing bugs left).

Best wishes,
Oscar

_________________
"What do you think of Western Civilization?"
"I think it would be a good idea!"
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
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pluby
The Architect
The Architect


Joined: Jun 16, 2003
Posts: 11949

PostPosted: Thu Sep 03, 2009 9:17 am    Post subject:

ovvldc wrote:
In this sense, you are a victim of your own succes. What worries me more is that you personally seem to be growing tired of NeoOffice. It might be worth investigating if you can substantially reduce your hours spent on NeoOffice for a few months. Never mind if some issues remain unsolved for a while (there aren't that many crashing bugs left).


You are right, our success is our biggest problem. Essentially, right now we have a broken business model in that as the number of users increases, our workload and costs increase but our revenues do not.

The answer to this is not to take time off. That only lets the flaws in our business model do more damage. Instead, the reasonable course of action is to deal with the flaws in the business model.

I can confidently say that our donors and volunteers are more than bearing the workload and costs they generate. Even when the donors ask questions that they could have easily found by searching, but that is not a problem because by making a donation, they are communicating that they value the use of our limited time.

The essential flaw in our business model is that non-donors think we provide free tech support because we have a free and open forum that is linked to from all over Google and t is not unreasonable for the average user to think that support is free and, in turn, that it costs nearly nothing.

Like I said to Smokey, ignoring their posts does not solve this perception problem. What is likely to solve this problem is to increasingly make it difficult to post support requests for non-donors and redirect the saved costs towards the donors. There is no requirement that we have to use donations to try to solve everyone's problem. Instead, I really believe that we should solve our donors' problems.

Of course, we will continue to have free downloads and read access to all of our online resources and we will leave a crashing and hanging bugs forum open to everyone as investigating those bugs is important. But, if a non-donor has a question, they are likely to see the following in the coming future:

1. Nearly all of our forum topics have a minimum required donation - I expect to do this in the NeoOffice Early Access Program Support forum first. After all, all Early Access Program members had to have donations to download.

2. The "Volunteer Support" forum will be move much lower in the list of forums - This makes it clear that non-donor users are not our first priority. Also, when a non-donor posts in that forum, they will probably have to step through a page like you do in our existing download page and they will definitely be warned that they should not be surprised if no one answers as the developers of NeoOffice do not look at this forum.

This may sound like we are restricting operations but we are not. On the contrary, we are shifting our limited resources to those that fund those resources. This is why we implemented the NeoOffice Early Access Program and we are developing NeoOffice Mobile: to provide our donors some value for their donation.

Patrick
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Lorinda
Captain Mifune


Joined: Jun 20, 2006
Posts: 2051
Location: Midwest, USA

PostPosted: Fri Sep 04, 2009 10:55 am    Post subject:

Patrick:

I think what you have laid out in terms of separate donor and non-donor forums makes a lot of sense.

I had been wondering if those of us who are volunteers needed to stop answering non-donor questions, to reinforce the restriction of support levels. I was beginning to think that my choice to continue to respond to non-donors was actually undermining what you and Fran have been trying to do by restricting your time to donors.

I agree completely that you and Fran need to do this with your time. You need both a workable business model and a schedule that provides adequate time for Sabbath, self-care, and recreation. Limiting my own interactions for donors goes against my grain as a volunteer, but I was beginning to think that I was going to have to strive to do so despite my own inclinations, just to properly support your efforts.

Separating out the forums is a far better solution. It means that those of us who want to can continue to volunteer our time there--once the donor support issues have been dealt with. It also means that we don't run into the trap (that we could now) of saying "I see you haven't donated to NeoOffice, you will need to make a donation before the developers can respons." I have to keep reminding myself that only the moderators can see other people's stars. With a separate forum for non-donors, we can explain that as needed in that forum.

We should be prepared for some initial (and perhaps continuing) consternation at the concept of a paid support forum. The key will be to respond calmly, but firmly, refusing to escalate when people lose their tempers. (And some folks will). That might be better left to some of us who are volunteers, in great part to reinforce that you and Fran don't follow the volunteer support forum.

One question I do have is how crashing bugs reported by non-donors would be handled. Will you need to ignore them? Or should there be a process that the moderators use to "vet" the reports, and then alerting you when the initial vetting process was completed. (i.e. after crash reports were attached and checked for hacks.) Is there an easy way for some of us to learn how to read crash reports for things like system hacks? I know Samwise can already do so, but I currently can't.

Lorinda

Lorinda
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OPENSTEP
The One
The One


Joined: May 25, 2003
Posts: 4752
Location: Santa Barbara, CA

PostPosted: Sat Sep 05, 2009 12:26 pm    Post subject:

From my own personal perspective, crash logs really are a different beast from support questions. I think that yeah we'll always continue to vet them just like we've been doing since we restricted adding new issues in BZ to admins. Personally, I view crashes as serious issues since, unlike little kerning or drawing glitches, usually there's no reliable way to work around them.

Looking at crash reports for haxies and other extensions isn't too hard, but yeah I guess crash reports don't make too much sense to folks that haven't been reading them for a long time Smile At the end of crash reports is a section called "Binary images" (maybe it's also "Loaded images" in older ones? I forget). That actually lists all of the different "libraries" that are loaded. A "library" (and similarly, a "Framework") is a piece of computer code that is loaded by the running application. When we look for haxies, we basically search through this list for things that are not either NeoOffice libraries or one of the Apple system libraries.

For example, quickly doing a "Find" for "com.unsanity" on a crash report will usually be a quick search for ShapeShifter, MightyMouse, or any APE based system extensions.

There are still some extensions that may not be able to be found through this method, but its usually a good starting point for how we try to help users by seeing if the crash goes away when those OS customizations are turned off. Most of this is just from past experience, but even Apple got bitten by this whole haxie and driver incompatibility problems too and now in 10.6 they're removing some software at the time of installation. Remember all the issues with people upgrading to 10.5 that had some older APE versions installed? Smile

Do you think it might be helpful to set up a wiki page where we can try and keep a list of the different extensions and haxies that we encounter in crash reports?

ed
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ovvldc
Captain Naiobi


Joined: Sep 13, 2004
Posts: 2352
Location: Zürich, CH

PostPosted: Sat Sep 05, 2009 4:41 pm    Post subject:

Lookin for unsanity might even be automated:

Whenever a text file is attached, scan it for one or two terms that are pretty exclusive to crash reports as well as "com.unsanity". If you get a match, automatically post the usual reponse to the forum topic...

Best wishes,
Oscar

_________________
"What do you think of Western Civilization?"
"I think it would be a good idea!"
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
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pluby
The Architect
The Architect


Joined: Jun 16, 2003
Posts: 11949

PostPosted: Sun Sep 06, 2009 11:05 am    Post subject:

OPENSTEP wrote:
For example, quickly doing a "Find" for "com.unsanity" on a crash report will usually be a quick search for ShapeShifter, MightyMouse, or any APE based system extensions.


I also look for anything loaded from an "InputManagers" folder. There should never be any of those any nearly all system hacks that we have found are in the /Library/InputManagers or ~/Library/InputManagers folder.

Patrick
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jakeOSX
Ninja
Ninja


Joined: Aug 12, 2003
Posts: 1373

PostPosted: Tue Sep 08, 2009 6:19 pm    Post subject:

i wandered off. sorry, suppose that is the subject of a different post.

patrick, a few years ago i advised you to try to ease off of some of the support. the advice then was the same as now: we (the neo community) prefer you to devote your time to code and not answerable questions.

there are volunteers who are here to help ease your support efforts by being the 'first tier' if you will.

i started the neowiki to help ease your support efforts. smokey, yoxi, oscar, james and others all helped with questions here in the forum. the 'council' stood with you against the oncoming questions.

but we didn't. not really. for some reason you have always insisted on going at this alone. i don't know why. you don't have to answer all the questions. this was never expected of you.

when you speak of 'limited resources' you are speaking of yourself, fran and ed. these have never been the extent of your resources.

trinity started as a community forum, where openoffice.org mac users came because we had no where else to go. here we found help from each other and because of that community we stuck around to see printing and proper menu bars and even new icons.

so if this paid forum will make it so you slow down some of your support, i'd support it. but i'd ask that you let the neooffice community keep as it always has, supporting members.

if there is little or no free support to be found here, people will go elsewhere, and all we built on this foundation of helping (even those oo.ox11 guys) will be gone. that was a foundation i helped build, one i don't want to see go away.

i know that things are what they are, and that this has to do with funding as much as time and frustration, but i wanted to speak my peace.
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ovvldc
Captain Naiobi


Joined: Sep 13, 2004
Posts: 2352
Location: Zürich, CH

PostPosted: Wed Sep 09, 2009 2:05 am    Post subject:

I think the wiki is the best support resource we have. I think t least half of the support questions are handled by pointing there. Jake and the Wiki Elves deserve major applause for this.

I see the need for getting Patrick to cut down on support, and the incentive it would bring towards donating. And I agree with Jake in that community support needs to be possible. But I will still be a bit nostalgic towards the time when we all worked in the same forum Smile.

At the same time, I realise I don't spend as much time answering questions and contributing materials as I used to (for personal reasons), so I feel I should have little voice in the matter.

AFAICT, the new system basically goes something like this: If you donate, ask Patrick and Fran. If not, ask the community.

_________________
"What do you think of Western Civilization?"
"I think it would be a good idea!"
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
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ovvldc
Captain Naiobi


Joined: Sep 13, 2004
Posts: 2352
Location: Zürich, CH

PostPosted: Tue Sep 22, 2009 10:54 pm    Post subject:

Reading the announcement made this morning, I am wondering where the volunteer-staffed forum discussed above has gone..

Best wishes,
Oscar

_________________
"What do you think of Western Civilization?"
"I think it would be a good idea!"
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
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narf
The Anomaly


Joined: Jan 21, 2007
Posts: 1075

PostPosted: Wed Sep 23, 2009 7:58 am    Post subject:

ovvldc wrote:
Reading the announcement made this morning, I am wondering where the volunteer-staffed forum discussed above has gone.


This is addressed in the section, "But why can't we just let anyone post and have the community support non-donors?" Specifically in the last paragraph of that section:

Quote:
We definitely have no problem with people providing free support. The problem is that the number of new non-donor support requests has grown much faster than the number of support volunteers. We definitely do not blame the volunteers as handling support requests is thankless and, many times, very unrewarding, work. We understand that some people will be very upset by our changes. Ideally, our changes will be the spark that motivates those people to create and staff a free NeoOffice support sites. It may not happen, but if it does we will be more than happy to add links to any such sites on the NeoOffice Support page.


Two forums "NeoWiki and Website Development" (this one) and "Server Outages and Problems" do not require donations to post.

--fran
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