Wed 26 Nov 2008
About dialogs with credits are important. In the past when developers were developing for developers it was a way of getting acknowledgement for hard work put into an application. Getting your name and e-mail in an about dialog was a badge of honor. It also notified would be developers on who to talk to to get info on contribution or sending a patch. This was when people were mostly in ‘the know’ about e-mail net etiquette.
As more and more people start using Linux on the desktop, many of who have different cultural norms shaping their net etiquette behaviour, we run into the issue of having to kindly tell people that it is immensely annoying to get spam from people seeking support. Sometimes we are in a bad mood or our own style of writing can be interpreted as hostile when trying to point people to the proper support channels. This could leave a first time user feeling like Linux isn’t worth the hassle of getting seemingly abusive replies when all they want is to get their computer working. If we want Linux to be easy we need to be able to easily point users to resources where they can get help on using their system. Asking them to innately understand cultural norms that we take for granted (I go to bugzilla for bugs, forums for distro help and mailinglists for development ideas) is asking for our userbase to consist of just Linux enthusiasts.
My simple suggestion. Add a big old I need support button to the about dialog which pulls a URL or text blurb which is set by the distro vendor. I like the idea of a URL where it can send users to some sort of wizard on the distros website (heck I would like a standard wizard module which sends upstream issues upstream and distro issues downstream but that is just wishful thinking). Paid customers of a commercial distro would get their support site (heck an IT department could even set all their desktops to filter to an internal support request form) and the community distros can get casual users to their resources.
Note that Ximian back in the day used to do something similar where each app had a way to get to an irc support channel. The idea was good but in reality I think the one time I tried it out there was only a bot in the channel. Taking that similar idea and instead pointing users to appropriate support sites would be the bee’s knees and save me from having an aneurysm when someone e-mails me asking for a network driver for such and such a device because they found my e-mail in the NetworkManager about box.
November 26th, 2008 at 2:25 pm
This sounds like a very good idea.
However, I’d like to point out that the About dialogs are sometimes quite annoying. One of the small things that annoy me about GNOME is that you can select ‘About’ from the right click menu of panel applets. I mean, when I right click on the trash can it’s because I want to empty the trash, not because I want to see who wrote the code.
November 26th, 2008 at 2:28 pm
Excellent idea. I wonder if we could do something even more clever in Yelp to direct people to an appropriate support forum for the document they’re looking at.
Here’s the problem I have: Joe User has a problem with Application X. Joe User clicks Help and doesn’t find the information he’s looking for (surprise!) Joe User clicks Help->About, in Yelp of course, and sends me email asking for help with Application X. FAIL.
November 26th, 2008 at 2:33 pm
@Shaun,
I though Yelp was just a direct interface to you and you have the answer to all
Man, you must get more support spam than I do.
November 26th, 2008 at 3:06 pm
A bunch of GNOME apps in Ubuntu have links to Launchpad to file bugs and ask support questions:
http://news.launchpad.net/projects/inkscape-embeds-launchpad-answers
November 26th, 2008 at 4:01 pm
Doesn’t Canonical do something like this with Launchpad in Ubuntu?
November 26th, 2008 at 5:01 pm
If Ubuntu does do something similar their users still finding and e-mail me. I’m talking about making this standard across all GTK+ apps, not patching a distro. It doesn’t help if distros are inconsistent here.
November 26th, 2008 at 6:13 pm
Good idea. I wrote Terminal Server Client (tsclient) and I almost regret having done it. Having my email address in the program opened me to a relentless barrage of support-type questions. I didn’t have a bugzilla, so bugs and feature requests were welcome, but support emails from people were too much. People were demanding, insulting and had no clue how to behave when asking for help. I gave the program away for free, that’s my contribution. I couldn’t afford to support it and every distro out there and when people started to misbehave, I stopped responding. I didn’t like that, but… No good alternative.
November 26th, 2008 at 8:50 pm
The only reliable way to prevent users emailing you is to not give them your email address. No matter how many “Get Support” or “Get Help Online” buttons you have, you’ll still get emailed.
Partly, I think this is because some people aren’t comfortable asking questions in a publicly archived fashion (web forums, bug trackers, public support systems). However, if they find an email address, perhaps they can solve the problem without embarrassment.
If you’re interested in something like the help menu entries in Ubuntu, the only really Ubuntu specific parts are the call out app, which contains the code to determine the source package for an application and forward the user to the appropriate page on Launchpad. That code is really simple, so an equivalent script could easily be done for other distros if they had appropriate landing pages on their web site.
November 27th, 2008 at 1:07 am
Sounds like a good idea, but maybe just a seperate item under the “Help” menu on applications? The “about” dialog seems like a strange place for people to have to find that sort of thing.
November 27th, 2008 at 4:40 am
@James or maybe because through the e-mail you can receive a faster reply than asking pubicly.
People should send bugs for first to their distros. Debian for instance explicitely says to report bugs to the Debian BTS instead of to the upstream.
So the distro should hack on the Help menus (I disagree with the About), and GNOME should give the chance to the distro to do it.
This would be an usability discussion IMHO as it’s harder to find the best way to let people use an alternative support method than everything else.
In other words:
- Distros must tweak GNOME settings in order to get reports
- GNOME should find the right UI solution and expose API for the distros
November 28th, 2008 at 3:11 pm
James is correct about cultural differences often leading people to use one method over another. As for taking the e-mail addresses out of the about boxes I agree that in a networked world a simple pointer to a project’s website with authors information (and specific notice on when it is appropriate to contact them directly). That is a project by project decision which could be helped along by having a standard template vetted by usability experts (usable in the terms that a user going to the site understands that the page is a credits page and not a place to get support).
The reason I say support information should go in the about box is because the about box is there to let a user to get meta information about the app which includes figuring out who to talk to when things don’t work. Of course meta info about a project is huge so perhaps the answer is to just open up a browser (which doesn’t really work in the NetworkManager case
In any case the guts of the post is to point out this situation is bad for both the developers and the users as they both end up getting annoyed. There needs to be a solution. In the commercial world there is a number (or increasingly theses days a single e-mail address). If you dial the wrong department they are usually more than happy to connect you to the right department. In the open source world where we don’t have a centralized/unified support and contact info needs to be open for development purposes while keeping the noise down we need to be able to effectively and clearly route users of all levels to the correct channels on the first try or they may never actually get there, giving up before they hit support that in many instances can outperform dedicated commercial based support. It is the bootstrapping conundrum and how we handle that is an important challenge.
November 29th, 2008 at 1:59 am
Some KDE projects mitigate against the problem of users mailing the author directly by making sure that the first email address users will see in the about dialog is the right address to send support requests to.
Simple affordance, give the users a path of least resistance and they will usually take it.
A standard consistent approach would be good too.