Having used Jabber in the past, I recently needed an IM solution and found myself looking at OpenFire.
After looking around for answers here and not finding any, I started using the search engines which only lead me to more unanswered questions. Looking at the forums here, it seems clear that the community needs to find some ways of helping each other in order for everyone to find what they need in this project.
There is no real need to reply to people saying RTFM or ‘Google is your friend’ unless it is very clear that the person has not spent any time reading or trying to find an answer. That type of behavior does not belong in a vibrant community where people are trying to help each other.
It seems time to find methods by which this community better helps itself along. As such, I propose this thread, meant to find ideas, suggestions and possible solutions that might help this community to better help itself.
Apparently, the current point system isn’t working. Mainly because people are not taking the time to update their questions to reflect an answer.
One thing I suggest is that when you do receive an answer, that you update your original question with SOLVED so that people know it is worth reading the full thread. Otherwise, when people read long winded threads where the OP didn’t bother to come back and share the solution, everyone becomes frustrated.
What else could help? There are devs, what is the next level? Would anyone care to achieve levels which give you a nice shiny icon by your name? If that’s not enough, what might help?
It would help, if the support forum would have more documents instead of forum entries. The questions repeat each other after some months (message archive purging) and important topics (e.g. the property that publishes the IP number of OF as file transfer proxy) are lost.
I wonder if there might be a way to give points to someone that does update their thread with a solution when one is found and getting negative points when they don’t? Maybe then users would be more encouraged to share or they would not get much help themselves.
First of all any community needs users with knowledge and this community has very few of them. And i don’t think people care much about the points, when they have to compete with people they don’t know ot they are not getting any valuable prizes. There is already an option to mark answers as Helpful or Correct. Admins can also mark a thread Assumed Answered if they think it is answered. There is also a Like option, but it doesn’t get much attention here.
We are using Jive SBS here which was provided by Jive Software to run this Community. I see a very limited list of scenarios to give points to a users and no option to give negative points. As well as for marking your own thread as answered. And i don’t think giving negative points will encourage anything. Sometimes you just don’t get any answer and can’t mark a thread as answered. Or users will start marking them as answered even if they are not, just for not getting negative points.
I know that seeking for a help in these forums can be frustrating at times. Because as i said we have a very few knowledgeable users here, and all of them have their own lives and jobs. I saw your postings about AV solutions, but i have no experience with that, so i can’t suggest anything. Post such questions in SparkWeb or Red5 section and maybe Dele (current contributor to audio/video solutions) will answer some of them after some time.
Points relating directly to your helping others was my thought, not for a badge or anything .
I hear you though, I agree, points aren’t the answer but the idea is to come up with some things which might help the problem.
Having lives and jobs doesn’t seem to come into play either, there are countless other projects out there which have tremendous amounts of activity by users with lives and jobs.
The knowledge level you speak of is an interesting point however. Like anything else, as you have people who gain some experience, they in turn usually start sharing that experience, and at different levels. I guess the question is really why aren’t people doing that here? What are the reasons that people aren’t helping others? I can’t imagine that it’s because there aren’t many users, this has been around for a long time.
What are those reasons and maybe we’ll touch on something.
I think this will be better for you. No offend. I know you have good intentions. But i just don’t see how can you (or we) change this situation. I’ve been here for 6 years now. I have seen how it was, and how it is now. In the past, when Jive was still behind the projects there were a bit larger crowd. We were holding weekly chats (well, this is still happening, but i haven’t attended it probably for 3-4 months and there are not so many people in the chat) and there were Jive developers and some active users chatting, helping each other, etc. Now we just have 2-3 fairly active users and this is not enough and i don’t know how to change that. And actually i don’t have time for this. Today i have 5 minutes to spend here before i go to bed. Often i don’t have even that much. And i usually choose to answer some technical questions than participate in such discussions.
I never said I could change anything, I only said it badly needs help so wanted to try. The top active members of this site could of at least jumped in to help out but only you have, sort of.
I don’t know how openfire can survive like this. Sucks though because the solution is incredible, I’d love to be using it for a number of things. Seems to work perfectly fine, it’s just damn near impossible to get information is where the prpblem is.
Well, i’ve got the impression that you or your project needs faster answers than this community can provide, so i think maybe it is better for you to try something else, though i don’t know how the things are with the other jabber projects.
As i have already mentioned, there aren’t many active members here. I can probably count 3 (including myself) who are fairly active. Daryl, you have already argued with in another thread, occasionally answers some threads, gives permissions to patch contributors, commits simple patches provided by those contributors, time to time restarts this site or fixes some other backend issues. Walter and his company, they are using Openfire and Spark at work, so he is investing his programmers to do some work on Spark currently. They are mainly targeted on areas they need. But this is better than nothing and occasionally they fix some other bugs or add features that users were asking. I think they plan to work on Openfire also later this year. Personally i think this is the best way for these projects to move on, when a company invest some resources. Because such companies usually have qualified programmers and can spend their work time for this. On the other side freelance contributors usually can only do contributing in their spare time. Some of them can do much, some of them have very limited time. So we need hundreds of such contributors to move on (and we have only 1-2), though it would be a nightmare to manage all of them. It was sometimes a hard task to collaborate with a few Walter’s programmers. You know, every developer has his own view on a design, features, etc.
Openfire is surviving like that for the last 2-3 years. It is working for some people. It works for me for 6 years now, though i just need a simple jabber server without audio/video or web client stuff.
Your requirements seems to be focused on A/V and IM integration in a web site. If you are working for a company, you may want to consider the costs of a “professional” solution like the ones Siemens or Cisco are offering in contrast to the cost of getting some Java developers to work for you. Any open source project has a significant issues with users who “just” want to have help with their special setup. In the end the project community is composed of developers not with support staff. That’s by teh way the reason why Red Hat os earning quites some money on the opens souurce flagship Red Hat.
My advise: Either get some skilled Java/PHP developer or some copmuter science students (not first year type), some servers and read through the forum, the code and so on.
When a project has the budget, we’ll often go the commercial route or hire someone to help out.
In the case of this project, we’re trying to put something together for a small organization which doesn’t have the funds so we’re trying to find all open source solutions.
As I mentioned in testing, A/V worked quite nicely, it’s just that getting beyond that doesn’t seem to work. Meaning, I cannot find answers to questions. If I could get those questions answered, I’m sure we could solve most if not all of the problems.
While not being programmers, we’re not new to Linux based projects or challenges.