Re: Web links integration in applications: bugs, translations, help...

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt myrealbox com>]

On Nov 28, 2007, at 8:33 AM, Loïc Minier wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 27, 2007, Andre Klapper wrote:
> > ...
> > i love firefox because of explanations that even my parents would
> > understand, if they'd touch computers.

"The page you are trying to view contains POSTDATA that has expired 
from cache."

> > but currently, 30% of non-crasher evolution reports are already 
> > "can't send mail. please help" reports, because of the "Submit Bug 
> > Report" menu item. i have the feeling it will become more. ;-)
>
> Hehe, I heard from our Firefox maintainer that he receives all kind of
> non-bug reports thanks to the "Help > Report a problem" menu entry in
> Ubuntu; "My wife is gone", "My cat is sick" etc. :)

I think linking to a bug tracker directly makes sense only if your user 
base is less than about five million (plus or minus a few million). 
Beyond that, the signal-to-noise ratio gets too low to be worth it.

> I guess the problem of receiving "can't send mail" bug reports might 
> be helped a little by having two different entries in Help; Ubuntu 
> currently has "Report a Problem" (it's "report a bug" in French 
> though), and "Get help online"

Not so helpful if the reason you can't send mail is that you aren't 
online. ;-)

> (this points to the community support portal).
> ...

This requires people to choose immediately which source of help is more 
likely to answer their question -- "Help Contents" or "Get Help Online" 
-- without having any of the knowledge necessary to make that decision. 
A more humane approach would be to provide a smooth escalation path: 
built-in help -> on-line help -> support forums or paid support.

That still means you need external URLs, just not in the Help menu 
itself. For example, if you do a search in Yelp and none of the results 
are what you're looking for, the search results page gives you a link 
to try the same search on gnomesupport.org. That link is designed to be 
customizable by distributors, so it can search the distribution's 
knowledge base or support forums instead.

Cheers
--
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/