General help

I hear ya bro. Take a look at tracker.moodle.org. This is where all the "real" stuff gets looked at. If there is a bug that is inherent with the code, most folks will look at it. As for as your knowledge level on something and the help from others, it is really comes down to digging into an issue and contributing. In fact, your digging into something, posting a fix may be just what the community is looking for.

Take a look at: tracker.moodle.org. Could be help there for ya'.

> And there are gaps in the documentation and faqs

Please be more specific. What exactly do you feel is missing? Are you aware that as a member of the Moodle community YOU can add information to a page on docs.moodle.org by clicking the "edit" tab?

> I just wonder if there needs to be some way of resolving this issue

I'm afraid I didn't quite understand clearly the "issue" you are talking about. Is it that "some queries don't get answered", or more particularly that you "have been looking for solutions on Moodle.org" but cannot find, or get, an answer?

I will go and look at some of the posts you have made and see if I can answer them.

regards
Gordon

Hi Joe

Maybe a critical stage between relative number of new users posting extensively before searching or posting after unsuccessful search, and number of relatively informed ones who dedicate part of their time to help.

A new function -Moodle T-Ask Force - could be invented by a group in each forum needing it, dedicating its efforts to :
analyzing the questions trends, identifying tips and tricks, validating methodic messages, creating an intermediate knowledge database so as to inform efficiently and quickly, giving links so as to to spare writing.
For example, as a non english native, I would spare some time to link to well written and validated solutions rather than finding my word, grading risky expressions of my own and delivering even more risky solutions (check by clicking my profil). Sometimes, you would lose some good unvolunteer words of my own. Sorry, I quit, kind of Alices' heir -how do you call that hurry animal with long ears and a clock ? Regards

I'm relatively new to moodle, and just started using these forums. I do lurk, and sometimes contribute, to what I think is a best-of-its-kind mailing list: mac-mgrs. It's for managers of Macintosh networks. What's unique, and VERY effective, are the rules of the list.

Briefly, they observed that most "help" lists suffer from very low signal-to-noise ratios. (Which is the root of Joe's point, I think.) To improve the ratio, they have a bunch of "how to use the list" pages and they really require that everybody read and follow the rules. It's a mailing list, not a forum, so maybe they have a little more control than we do here.

The key distinguishing rule is "no replies to the list". There are only two kinds of posts allowed: Problem description and Solution summary. If you have a suggestion that might help somebody who posted a Problem description, you send that directly to that person, NOT to the entire list. Then, it's the person who posted the Problem who must post the Solution summary. That is, the person who has the problem collects the suggestions, uses them to solve the original problem, and then posts what worked and didn't work in the solution. This way, list members don't have to sort through all of the guesses and suggestions to make sense of them. The owner of the Problem knows best what worked and why. Good Solution summaries then help everybody on the list, and the signal-to-noise is very high.

For more, see the mac-mgrs website. While the culture of mac-mgrs probably doesn't apply without modification, I think there are a bunch of good ideas there that we could import. In particular, they have very useful info describing what to do BEFORE you post, and what to include IN your post.

Finally, I think it's interesting to note that this thread is NOT one with 0 replies. It looks like people want to help, but many don't know how.

-Denny

My only comment is that you should particularly note that the forums are "staffed" by volunteers. Human nature being what it is, if resolving somebody else's problem takes a lot of interpretation or effort then it will probably get bypassed.

I've haven't specifically looked at your posts so this isn't aimed at you. However, please consider if you are providing enough information to make it *easy* for others to understand and resolve your problem. To be extreme, reports like "URGENT: Installation doesn't work, help me now!!!" are probably doomed to being ignored.

I can identify, Joe. Most of my queries concerning installation have heretofore been ignored. I imagine that is because my institution requires that our moodle site run on a MS server, IIS, with a MSSQL db, and the norm is linux, apache, and mysql. So I guess I'm SOL.