My impression to this board

[gzpxyj]

I am new to vicidial, but I am not that new to the asterisk. I have built my own asterisk pbx servers.
Here is my observation to this board:
1. Many people view the post but not many people post solutions. For example one post has one follow up post but 180 people viewed.
2. Only a few experts are posting answers or suggestions of answers to the post. The participation of others are limited. The board is not that active in answering questions. How to encourage people to post and get prompt answer is a question to this board. I have seen many post not followed/answered.
3. When some new users ask questions, some experts do not provide answer but question if he or she has read the manual. The effects of such question without also providing the answer are to tell people who post the question to shut up and read the manual before posting. I understand that selling the manual is one way to support the project. But telling people to purchase the manual and providing some solution to the post are good for the health of the board.
4. I really appreciate some experts spent their time to answer questions. If we can also get more people involved, that would be great!
Jim

[mflorell]

A few of my observations on these boards:
- Most of the questions on these boards have been asked many, many, many times before.
- Most new posters do not search the boards or google for the answer before they post
- Most new posters do not read the posting guidelines and do not bother to post the version they are using of Vicidial or Asterisk
- Most new posters have not even read the free version of the manuals, let along the help screens within the admin interface
- No one that is posting answers or responses is getting paid to do this, they are taking their time without compensation to provide free support to people who most of the time do not give back to the community in any way once they do get their question answered or their installation working.

There are a few exceptions to these observations and I thank those people for taking the time to learn about this forum community and our guidelines before expecting easy, free, quick fixes for all of their problems without doing the work to learn about the product they are trying to use.

As for gzpxyj, it seems most of your posts have been on this forum specifically, which I do not always respond to because I don't really have anything to do with the ViciDialNOW project, so issues specific to ViciDialNOW are usually out of my area of expertise. I do thank you for responding to others' posts though

As for me, I always try to check the forum at least once a day if not more, but sometimes the project and clients eat up my time and I cannot respond to everyone as I would like to. I thank the moderators that help to pick up the slack like williamconley, Op3r, gardo and the other non-moderator frequent posters who give their time to offer free support to the forum. You are one of the reasons that ViciDial is what it is today, withover 1000 installation in production around the world.

One last observation I have is that amongst all open source projects as a whole, ViciDial has one of the most responsive forum communities around.

[gardo]

Nicely put Matt.

@gzpxyj

We are all doing this on voluntary basis. We take the time off and answer as much as we can the questions that we can answer. Please don't expect too much from us.

[gzpxyj]

Nicely put Matt.

@gzpxyj

We are all doing this on voluntary basis. We take the time off and answer as much as we can the questions that we can answer. Please don't expect too much from us.

@gardo
Please did I say Matt or you did not do much? I voiced that we need an environment to encourage others to post and provide solutions. I am on this board not that long and I have been doing my part sharing what I know. I respect Matt and other experts on this board. I wish other people can share what they learn from the experts and contribute to the community.

[williamconley]

3. When some new users ask questions, some experts do not provide answer but question if he or she has read the manual. The effects of such question without also providing the answer are to tell people who post the question to shut up and read the manual before posting. I understand that selling the manual is one way to support the project. But telling people to purchase the manual and providing some solution to the post are good for the health of the board.

We were ALL newbies once, and someone had to TELL ME to read the stickies (i didn't even know what they were!). I found my first post in my first forum from Google and had NO idea that there WERE stickies. So telling people "hey, read the manual, read the stickies, then come back and post your configuration and we'll help ..." is necessary.

Honestly, there should almost be a link we can "auto-drop" into those situations. It helps the new user more than us when they are made to go back and do it right.

The basic manual is free (the advanced manual costs money). It's not about "sales" of the manual (for instance: I am independent and make NO money from sales of the manual!).

I (and all the others like me) donate our time for free. I am VERY happy to help others become more advanced in their knowledge of this software, or to help newbies who are trying their best but just don't understand a feature. Mostly I'm here because I spent HOURS beating my head against things only (later) to find out that someone else HAD the information I needed and all I had to do was ask (thanks again, Matt, by the way).

That being said: I am NOT happy spending my time training someone who won't bother downloading and reading a FREE training manual. But I can hardly blame them if I don't mention to them that it exists!

Now, AFTER they go back and read the manual and give it the old "college try", I'm happy to help out. Now they are up to speed and we can help them properly. Sometimes i'll drop the answer if it's obvious, but often the answer will depend on several things they did not bother to mention because they did not know. None of us want to send a newbie off on a wild goose chase (or three) just because they haven't read the manual. Better to start them off on the right path.

You actually read all that? You have some serious endurance. Or too much time on your hands. Hm.