Project talk:Support desk/Archive 1

New support desk not being used
The support desk was very active before the recent structural changes, but nobody is posting any questions any more, so perhaps a more intuitive or simpler format needs to be used. I don't know what the best structure may be, but I miss giving my daily half-hour of support and much preferred doing it here than at #mediawiki. --Nad 04:12, 15 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Yes, the restructure completely turned many people off (including myself, actually). I much preferred having it on one simple page, albeit it needed a better method of searching past archived topics. --Skizzerz talk - contribs 04:15, 15 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Let's discuss this here. -PatPeter, [[Image:Tournesol.png|20px]] MediaWiki Support Team  00:53, 16 March 2008 (UTC)
 * As for how active it is now, I still have a couple dozen new edits on my watchlist everyday; have you clicked all the links at the top of this page? You can still give support, I think what you are feeling/conveying/saying is that the Support desk is overwhelming in where to give support, I would suggest taking one section at a time. Remember the overall goal for us should be to make the manual so easy to read that people don't need to ask questions. Take Extensions for example, I know I have made a couple good edits to a couple extension pages from support questions now that they are easier to see. -PatPeter, [[Image:Tournesol.png|20px]] MediaWiki Support Team  01:00, 16 March 2008 (UTC)
 * I came to this page for the first time today to find an answer to a configuration question. I didn't find the answer, so I posted a new question. Overall, I found the process to be awkward and inconvenient. I'm accustomed to searching the Usenet for this type of support, and I think Google Groups is a much better interface than the one you've created here. I love MediaWiki to death, and I think it's a great tool for many applications, but I'm not sure a knowledgebase is one of them. If you're considering a different format, have you thought about making a Usenet newsgroup? -TC —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 68.106.184.113 (talk • contribs) 16:07, 29 March 2008. Please sign your posts!
 * Could you link to Usernet and Google Groups? And you do know that MediaWiki was made for a knowledge base? i.e. Wikipedia? And when you said "came to this page" you mean came to the site right? Because we have an entire manual here. -PatPeter, [[Image:Tournesol.png|20px]] MediaWiki Support Team  02:26, 1 April 2008 (UTC)


 * The header included a link to the communication page, which links to the MediaWiki-l mailing list, but I've added in a direct link on the header. The mailing list is usually a better place to ask questions, since it has more people monitoring it and is easier to use (if you like email lists, anyway). —Emufarmers(T 05:08, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

Problem viewing Project:Support desk
Hello! When I first came in to ask my question several days ago (in "unsorted threads") there were no problems viewing the main page Project:Support desk, but now, when accessing the page, after loading there are a lot of grey bars spread all over the page, some smaller, some bigger – but just in Firefox 1.5, IE6/Opera 9.25 are working fine with the page. The subpages work well in FF, so where could this problem be caused? Regards --89.55.150.81 08:19, 20 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Those bars are moving down the page everytime something is added here. One line added – moving down one line and so on. I really don't know what to do (besides using another browser). Regards --89.55.148.247 16:56, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

Dividing up into subpages
Perhaps it is time to divide this page up into subpages related to its various sections... --Emesee 00:46, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

Combine multiple subpages
Is there a way I can combine all of the subpages into one? That way I can have a printable version for them. --Rocco2008 3 July 2008

Support desk overhaul (autumn 2008)
Hmm, how should I start …

Well, we got more and more complaints about our support desk in the last months, mainly because of its lack of usability and the number of unanswered questions (see Titoxd's anticipatory comment here, from May 2007!). – Some complaints have been made on-wiki, see e.g. above, but many more on IRC or elsewhere I guess (at least I got several, perhaps about 20, complaints by different users on irc/pm this summer).

The support desk has been split from only one page into nine sections in February/March this year. Since then, the number of visible requests on the Support desk page increased rapidly, from an average of ~90 in December 2007/January 2008 to more than 660 at the end of August 2008. Additionally some beforehand pretty active users, who regularly provided support here, left (either entirely or "more or less").

Please don't get it wrong. This is not a personal statement neither against the so called support team, nor against particular users who went forward and introduced/supported the multi-section layout of the page. I really do appreciate the work most users do on this site (especially their committed contributions to help others), and of course, it's a wiki, and sometimes one has to try out a new style/structure/whatever to see if it really works better (or not). And well, if it does not work better after some period of active testing, one has to find a new solution. IMO, this is the case now. Again, I really mean no harm by writing all this down :-)

So what did I found before I started the cleanup/reorganisation a few days ago?

662 threads in total on one page, impressive, eh? ;-)

Short summary:
 * We have a problem with archiving.
 * Some sections were used rather rarely.
 * Most requests went to the "Unsorted" section.

Conclusions:
 * Archiving is a permanent task; threads older than 1 month (or so) should be archived as "outdated".
 * The number of sections could/should be reduced (combining of the rather rarely used ones preferred) or we should go back to a one-page structure (but archive to per-topic archives).

Ok, so what have I done so far?

Primarily I've already archived lots of outdated/resolved threads (from >660 to <340 atm), started a new archives overview, and partly resorted threads chronologically (still working on the whole bulky archiving issue, though). Furthermore I've made an attempt to substantially shorten the main instruction intro (could need further tweaks, of course), and to reword some templates so that they appear friendlier and become less complicated for newbies, see e.g. one of the preload templates.

My basic requests and/or ideas now are the following:
 * Please all try to help out with the most recent threads of all sections (July, August, September), so that we considerably shorten the long queue. Could we manage this within two weeks perhaps?
 * I'll archive the rest of older threads (June and back) soon, regardless of their status (solved or not).
 * Please browse the archives (reading the headings should be sufficiant at first go) and see if you find threads that belong to another section. If you do, simply c&p them (don't forget to state something like "moved from/moved to Project:Support_desk/Archives/Foo/001 " in the edit summary).
 * I suggest to combine the sections "TemplateTable" and "Misc" (mostly CSS/JS questions) to a new section called "Formatting" (already did that for the archive), and to combine "Images" and "Uploads" to another section (no idea for a good name yet, perhaps simply "Media", "Files" or such?). Any ideas?

Further suggestions welcome. Many thanks in advance for reading and commenting :-) -- :bdk: 23:43, 3 September 2008 (UTC)


 * Thank you, bdk, for creating Project:Support desk/Archives. I did not do it myself because I only wanted to archive 50 topics at a time, all of which resolved, so as to keep unsolved topics on the Support desk until we solve them. Instead of those "This page is an archive, please do not edit it." We should ask that people edit the outdated articles if they can provide support, and change it to RESOLVED. (In case someone puts a line break between this and the next post: -PatPeter [[Image:Tournesol.png|20px]]  MediaWiki Support Team  21:47, 6 September 2008 (UTC))
 * We can use common sense here. >90% of users never do and never will look up any archive. If there really is someone who actually wants to add solutions to 6 months old questions, well, nobody will say "no" only because it's an archived page. But keep in mind, that this is just a hypothetical situation. I rarely saw this happening on wikis in all the years, regardless of the presence or absence of such a "don't edit, it's an archive" note. -- :bdk: 08:33, 21 September 2008 (UTC)


 * Anyway, which sections do you think users do not use? We already have two sections that combine two or three topics each. Nevermind I just read the ones you want to add together. Adding TemplateTable and CSS/JS to formatting would be brilliant, when I still had time to edit the support desk I thought we would have enough posts to sustain both sections. As far as Uploading and Images go, Uploading pertained to the actual process of uploading and Images pertained to use of images on the Wiki. You have the right track, we should rename that one "File hosting" or "Media" would suffice. Though people could interpret media as a few different things, so "file hosting" would most likely suffice. (In case someone puts a line break between this and the next post: -PatPeter [[Image:Tournesol.png|20px]]  MediaWiki Support Team  21:47, 6 September 2008 (UTC))
 * Good idea, thanks :-) "File hosting" sounds reasonable as a subpage title. And we're always free to expand the readable headings or links to e.g. "File hosting (uploading, images, etc.)", of course. -- :bdk: 08:33, 21 September 2008 (UTC)


 * I no longer bureaucrat and system manage a wiki, and I have college now, because of said reasons I cannot edit as much, and I don't particularly want to. No one on the Support Team does what we need them to, RESOLVING. (In case someone puts a line break between this and the next post: -PatPeter [[Image:Tournesol.png|20px]]  MediaWiki Support Team  21:47, 6 September 2008 (UTC))
 * Oh and on a different topic, since I thought about it. Do you think that it is good that we have more posts coming in on the support desk? The system seems to work better, but we do not have enough people to work on it. Personally, I found trying to mark all topics as RESOLVED, when a Support Team member resolved them (for which they cannot always do, what does the policy say, 5 days and then we archive it if the person does not respond and the topic remains unresolved? [or maybe 3 days... I could check but that would require effort, also I like my posts to have a conversational feel, where I would not reference this when talking to you. (In case someone puts a line break between this and the next post: -PatPeter [[Image:Tournesol.png|20px]]  MediaWiki Support Team  21:47, 6 September 2008 (UTC))
 * Miscellaneous comments: In future archives make sure the combined number of outdated and resolved always equals 50, even numbers help the archiving process so much. A support team member should move topics in the unsorted section almost automatically, too bad we do not have enough people yet again. -PatPeter [[Image:Tournesol.png|20px]]  MediaWiki Support Team  21:47, 6 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Yup, known problem. The so called "support team" – roughly curtailed (again, no personal offense meant!) – seems either to not really exist (due to wide inactivity) or to concentrate on maintenance issues instead of actual support (btw, I don't/won't call myself a "support team member" … taking care a little bit, though). Hmm, I'm only speaking on my behalf, but from my point of view the whole "support team" stuff (including prominent linking on the support desk, explicit signatures etc.) is rather misleading for the big group of new users who're just looking for help here. Promoting the "support team" this way obviously leads to the (wrong) impression that there are (enough) people (appearing more or less as a "closed group") who are helping, and partly, that only "support team members" are able/allowed to reply "officially", or to close/move threads, etc. This is not the case, as you might know best yourself. So perhaps it's better to remove the "support team" stuff soon if nothing changes regarding activity of its members (as regards quantity and quality of support desk edits), and instead to encourage all users to help each other again.
 * Hmm, 50 threads per archive? I don't think this is a reasonable idea. Length (kB) of a page is more important than the pure number of headings in a TOC, imo. And it's often more useful to take care of sorting threads really chronologically, and e.g. to archive per half-year or per month terms. Also, same here as above: We can use common sense. It's better not to define such hard rules ("always exactly 50") on a wiki :-)
 * And, of course, an active support desk is good. For a really "working" support desk, we "only" have to reply to/solve 5 questions a day if 5 new posts come in each day ;-) Reducing the queue of too old/outdated threads is a main task atm therefore (still much to do). -- :bdk: 08:33, 21 September 2008 (UTC)


 * I have tried to Mark resolved most of them. I think I got through the first 100 or so. But finally, we are archiving it. There is something I wanted to point out though. A lot of people asking questions here do not fill out their site info. It would be nice if they did, because thats I question I always ask them. So is there anyway we can make it required unless if they are users, in which they can write soemthing like Not Applied.--' Truetech    (Talk)   [[Image:Tournesol.png|20px]]  MediaWiki Support Team '' 02:52, 12 September 2008 (UTC)
 * It has always autoloaded, we should become more strict. Resolve all topics that do not give site info, of course giving a message that you have resolved it because of that. -PatPeter [[Image:Tournesol.png|20px]]  MediaWiki Support Team  17:38, 20 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Hmm, if there's something we can learn from big wikis like en.wikipedia it's that you never get all users to follow all "formal rules" for posting questions, editing talk pages, etc. That's a fact (probably due to human nature *g*). Of course, you can try out more obtrusive boxes, dissuasive formulation of warnings, rude removals of all "wrong"-formatted entries, you can even block users for repeatedly posting at the top of pages instead of the bottom (as it is common on wikis), whatever. Nothing helps in the long run. Ok, this is what we should not do. But what else then? – Well, I made good experiences with the KISS principle (keep it simple, stupid) with emphasis on friendliness (keep it sweet & simple). Normally, users tend to ignore too long texts and too strict rules (the same in real life: who really reads the directions for use of a coffee percolator before using it the first time? who really listens to "don't do this or that" by a teacher? who never "jumped a red light" as a pedestrian?) … so if we want the support desk to become an effective place for users who are simply seeking for help, we should be geared to our own expectations of good support (how do you expect e.g. good ISP support hotline's staff to behave? advisable and friendly or circumventive and rude?). I know, these are some blunt, overstated analogies, but they're to the point, imo.

How can I fix this?
Creating tables... using MySQL 4 table defs...Query "CREATE TABLE `wiki_categorylinks` ( cl_from int(8) unsigned NOT NULL default '0', cl_to varchar(255) binary NOT NULL default , cl_sortkey varchar(86) binary NOT NULL default , cl_timestamp timestamp NOT NULL, UNIQUE KEY cl_from(cl_from,cl_to), KEY cl_sortkey(cl_to,cl_sortkey), KEY cl_timestamp(cl_to,cl_timestamp) ) TYPE=InnoDB " failed with error code "Specified key was too long; max key length is 1000 bytes (localhost)".