Re: Euphoria Documentation Project
Yup - a good idea - a website. But I was thinking of a website as more of a
place to put the FAQ.
The problem with a website for data entry is this: How do you get the
request from the website to the list so that people can respond? So, as I
see it, the problem with websites a this stage is that they require the
responders to go to the site to look for problems to solve - my guess is
that they won't. So I seek a way to handle the whole thing as messages on
the list - people post questions now, people respond. What I hope to do is
take advantage of that and just automate it a bit so that the questions and
answers can be gathered and compiled without a lot of intervention.
Another thing that I want to accomplish is to get a format that'll let me
mine the list's past postings to get a bunch of material to start the FAQ
off.
I'm still working on the problem of how to make the forms clear, and from
the feedback I can see that I've a ways to go yet. Hopefully, I can get to a
readable enough form that people can give me some feedback about whether
they think I'm gathering the right information.
But really - text substitution in an ascii file is too hard for people to
handle? I actually thought it would work pretty well - people could just
keep a copy of the request form on their harddrive, and fill it out and send
it in whenever they had a question. Similarly, people could keep a copy of
the response form and when they have an answer to offer they would just fill
out that form and send it in. By using the forms, then I. or someone can
just set up a filter that'll dump the info into database. That seems quite a
bit easier than a web form to me.
Bye
Martin
----- Original Message -----
From: Dan B Moyer <DANMOYER at PRODIGY.NET>
To: <EUPHORIA at LISTSERV.MUOHIO.EDU>
Sent: Saturday, April 08, 2000 7:33 PM
Subject: Re: Euphoria Documentation Project
> Martin,
>
> I like the idea of some more documentation for Euphoria very much, but I
> have to agree with John McAdam that your question/response protocols are
too
> off-putting. I can understand your desire to reduce the labor intensive
> nature of the project, but I think his idea of a question form to fill out
> on a web site is much better, although I wouldn't want it restricted to
just
> web ring members.
>
> As an alternative, when I first noticed the unfortunate lack of a Euphoria
> FAQ, my thought was that everyone who asks questions on the list could
> "re-pay" the general helpfulness of the list members by contributing their
> questions & received answers to a FAQ, thus distributing the load for
> creating it. I assume that most who ask questions probably *save* the
> answer(s) they receive, for future reference, and could relatively easily
> sort through them on a monthly basis & send their questions & the
answers(s)
> to whoever might be maintaining the FAQ, which could then be copied to
> various member's web sites. At worst case, list members could sort
through
> the list archives for some of their own questions, & pick good answers to
> send in for the FAQ.
>
> Dan Moyer
> and John McAdam responded to some zipped up suggested question/answer
> protocols contained in another post:
>
> <The proposed model looks pretty difficult for us simpletons.
> If this was a web page where you could fill in some form
> of the kind you suggest it might be viable. The web page
> could be clickable from members of the euphoria web ring.
> Then another form for answers... Hmmm...This is a lot of
> extra work for us. Keep thinking.>
>
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