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)