Comments on: GTK 3.0 – About/Credit Dialog Request

By: Alan

Alan — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 05:59:22 +0000

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.

By: J5

J5 — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 19:11:02 +0000

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.

By: Luca Bruno

Luca Bruno — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 08:40:25 +0000

@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

By: chrismurf

chrismurf — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 05:07:33 +0000

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.

By: James Henstridge

James Henstridge — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 00:50:56 +0000

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.

By: Erick Woods

Erick Woods — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 22:13:31 +0000

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.

By: J5

J5 — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 21:01:03 +0000

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.

By: Ben

Ben — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 20:01:05 +0000

Doesn’t Canonical do something like this with Launchpad in Ubuntu?

By: Corey Burger

Corey Burger — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 19:06:27 +0000

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

By: J5

J5 — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 18:33:33 +0000

@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.