Web forums...

Web forums...

[Lee Revell]

It was recently brought to my attention that users are finding and
fixing (or at least working around) ALSA bugs in various web forums and
completely leaving the ALSA developers out of the loop.  One user
basically implied that it was common knowledge that if you have $FOO
mainboard, then $BAR patch from som random Nvidia forum is needed to get
sound working.  All news to me.  I guess they assume we follow every web
forum in existence and know about every ALSA bug ever posted anywhere on
the Internet.

It seems like a valuable resource (users willing to test this stuff on
bleeding edge hardware) is going to waste because they don't even bother
to give feedback to the developers.

Of course ALSA development isn't moving to some lame web forum, and we
obviously don't have the bandwidth to follow 1000 hardware-specific
Linux user forums - can anything be done about this problem, other than
educating users that web forums are lame?

Lee







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Re: Web forums...

[Tilman Kranz]

Lee Revell wrote:
> [...]
> Of course ALSA development isn't moving to some lame web forum, and we
> obviously don't have the bandwidth to follow 1000 hardware-specific
> Linux user forums - can anything be done about this problem, other than
> educating users that web forums are lame?
> 
> Lee

Well ... there is the ALSA-Wiki [1] but it is quite different in
appearance and use from a webforum.

I see two problems:

1. In my estimation it is part of the business model of some
blacksheep webforums to attract users and keep them unclear about the
reference sources of information. They finance their operation
through "hits" / advertisement, and appropriate redirection is thus
contradicting their intentions. I am far from generalizing this to
all web forums. Some are good and consistent, some are unaware of the
negative effect their operation might have[2].

2. Many users prefer webforums because it is their style of
communication to talk to "alike" users, i.e. users who are in
similar situations, users who have no problem with discussing
matters on the base of incomplete or diffuse data. They have the
feeling that form and content in such forums bring them to results
faster. Such a demand can not be accomodated easily. They, after
all, might be correct.

Greetings,
Tilman

[1] http://alsa.opensrc.org/
[2] The "negative effect" being, as you described it, the ALSA
project missing valuable input.


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