Request for Volunteers to build a FAQ
Posted: Sat Jul 04, 2009 1:11 pm
I'm looking for a few good men (or women) to maintain a FAQ.
What I'd like to see is a FAQ for each tool (although MapTool is really the critical one, given the activity level). I think a single thread might work: first post gives an overview of the troubleshooting process, then breaks the problems down into categories (Java version, networking, image management, token management, etc). Each of those categories would have its own post as a reply later in the thread and would be linked to from the original post. Each post would have a series keyword tags assigned to it so that the search function would be "forced" to find them, even if the words were short or had a lot of occurrences. (We don't currently have a tagging system, but I'm looking at a couple of MODs that will add that feature.)
My goal is for someone who's new to the tool(s) to have a single thread to visit for all of the common issues.
I would prefer a volunteer who's been around the forums for awhile so that they've seen the kinds of questions I'm referring to. They would cull the various questions from threads going back over time and put together a semi-coherent FAQ and be willing to keep it up to date as new questions come up. So this needs to be someone who reads question threads and can pull out the question and the answer (even if they can't answer it themselves). Questions that have an answer of "wait for 1.4" should still appear in the FAQ as well. (For example, we get questions about "how do I change the FOW color after the map is created". The answer is "wait for 1.4" but also a link to a post that describes how to open the ZIP file and modify the content.xml.)
I won't lie: I think is a fairly big project to get off the ground. If you feel like taking a whack at it, please respond here or PM me. If we get multiple volunteers, then you folks can get together to work out the details amongst yourselves. In fact, I'll create a forum area that only that group will have access to so that they can discuss the issues and work on the FAQ separately without people barging in on them (well, except for the admins here ). Then we can move the FAQ thread to the appropriate forum later. I suspect some things you'll want to ask the community about, but other things could be done on the side. Sort of like how Brad asks the community about ideas for the videos, but actually does the work himself and then posts the results.
Thanks in advance!
What I'd like to see is a FAQ for each tool (although MapTool is really the critical one, given the activity level). I think a single thread might work: first post gives an overview of the troubleshooting process, then breaks the problems down into categories (Java version, networking, image management, token management, etc). Each of those categories would have its own post as a reply later in the thread and would be linked to from the original post. Each post would have a series keyword tags assigned to it so that the search function would be "forced" to find them, even if the words were short or had a lot of occurrences. (We don't currently have a tagging system, but I'm looking at a couple of MODs that will add that feature.)
My goal is for someone who's new to the tool(s) to have a single thread to visit for all of the common issues.
I would prefer a volunteer who's been around the forums for awhile so that they've seen the kinds of questions I'm referring to. They would cull the various questions from threads going back over time and put together a semi-coherent FAQ and be willing to keep it up to date as new questions come up. So this needs to be someone who reads question threads and can pull out the question and the answer (even if they can't answer it themselves). Questions that have an answer of "wait for 1.4" should still appear in the FAQ as well. (For example, we get questions about "how do I change the FOW color after the map is created". The answer is "wait for 1.4" but also a link to a post that describes how to open the ZIP file and modify the content.xml.)
I won't lie: I think is a fairly big project to get off the ground. If you feel like taking a whack at it, please respond here or PM me. If we get multiple volunteers, then you folks can get together to work out the details amongst yourselves. In fact, I'll create a forum area that only that group will have access to so that they can discuss the issues and work on the FAQ separately without people barging in on them (well, except for the admins here ). Then we can move the FAQ thread to the appropriate forum later. I suspect some things you'll want to ask the community about, but other things could be done on the side. Sort of like how Brad asks the community about ideas for the videos, but actually does the work himself and then posts the results.
Thanks in advance!