[META] Public mailing list nature of support at pidgin (was: Please help)

[David Woolley]

Brian Morrison wrote:

> I don't think you understand. Pidgin support is done via a mailing
> list, there is no physical support department, everything is done by a

You should probably says "public mailing list"!

Whilst this is what any regular user of open source software, or even 
commercial loss leader "free" software, would expect, a lot of people 
seem to be making this mistake.

Given the apparent market for Pidgin, which is not very aware of typical 
open source support mechanisms, it might be worth reviewing the 
documentation to make sure that it is made explicit that support 
requests go immediately into the public domain (confidentiality sense).

> combination of the developers and users who help out.
> 

Actually one should be trying to encourage people to look at the 
archives.  We would get hardly any MXit queries if MXit users looked 
there before posting.

Also, if people can submit without subscribing, it might be worth 
educating users that they need to copy to the poster, when replying. 
Although this is becoming more and more common on lists, long term list 
users don't expect two copies and don't expect to copy everyone when 
they reply.  (I'm not copying you here, only because I assume you are an 
experienced list user.)

-- 
David Woolley
Emails are not formal business letters, whatever businesses may want.
RFC1855 says there should be an address here, but, in a world of spam,
that is no longer good advice, as archive address hiding may not work.