Martin Dougiamas

Norbert, yes, tracker.moodle.org is definitely intended to be the main and best way to notify people of issues. John filed a good one (MDLSITE-453)

If you categorise it correctly then it has some hope of getting to the right person (rather than requiring every busy person to read and parse every forum here). For example, I only found these posts here just now because someone pointed them out to me.

In this case, the dedicated mail.moodle.org server was down for one day or so on our long weekend because of the ISP problems. Then it came up yesterday and I thought all was well. It wasn't until I awoke this morning that I realised that it still wasn't working correctly (and that new user signups were affected! ), which was when I switched to using this web server for email again (causing some load). I've now made a wider announcement here: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=98517)

I am busy as always trying to expand our team to cope with everything, we're not perfect but I know we're improving (at least it's generally no longer just me trying to run everything 24hrs a day!)

I have posted on the front page now. Mail was not spooled unfortunately (the spooling server is exactly what went down).

There was an explosion at the data center where the moodle.org email server is (9000 servers are offline), so email from forums and messaging is not working at the moment:

http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/08/06/01/1715247.shtml

No, I didn't think it would work with you, but I did want to give you one last chance. I didn't expect you to break basic netiquette again by re-posting private email to the forums without permission.

After *two years* sticking up for you and trying to come to some understanding with you I've finally had enough of your calculated and prolonged disruptions in these forums. A lot of time has been wasted.

This is the very first time I have ever had to come to this point with any user in any forum I've ever been involved with, and it goes against every inclusive principle that I hold, so this is a very difficult decision for me. I feel terrible about it. However, consider yourself banned for 12 months.

Your account has been given the "Can not post" role sitewide. None of your posts etc will be touched. Perhaps someone might like to research this whole episode and the different points of view, I think it would make a fascinating paper or even a thesis.

I fully expect you to keep creating new accounts and trying to bypass the ban, but while you do so you might want to think about your motives for being involved on moodle.org at all.

Hi Marc, there were a couple of things mixed into this, let me clarify.

1) Sticky posts vs docs ... that was the point I was responding to because of previous discussions. I realise it wasn't the main point of your starting post though, sorry. I agree that problems of currency in any documentation are real and need to be addressed, but would add that the same problems of outdated information would probably apply equally to sticky posts (and most people would be unable to help fix them).

2) Given that newbies might prefer to post regardless of how accessible or up-to-date docs are, finding some way to detect what resources they need and direct them there automatically ... I didn't mean to dismiss this idea completely, it's just a fair bit of precious programming time and extra load on the site. We could start by deriving keywords and searching the docs, right? Something like this:

http://docs.moodle.org/en/Special:Search?search=&fulltext=Search

(Regarding other appoaches, there is a re-write of Moodle.org under way that you could not have known about, which makes the documentation very up-front and visible on every page here).