Project Elf: quality effect poll

patburke

I noticed my "number of new posts since last visit" was coming in about 150 a day since I check about once a day. Today I noticed it was 1627 after not having visited over the weekend so about 3 days have passed. So that's, what, a 350% increase?

It certainly made it more tedious to quickly scan through the post titles to see if there's anything there that is useful to me. I can't say I noticed a drop in post quality since it's now hard to see the trees for the forest.

kamalakshantv

I feel the intention of the project elf itself was to increase forum activity and at this initial point of time they would prefer more active members(would help in stress test also).

baysmith

QtK, that is a very interesting. Thank you for pointing that out. Along the lines of "Any press is good press", perhaps any activity is better than no activity.

kamalakshantv

[quote author="Bradley" date="1291625109"]QtK, that is a very interesting. Thank you for pointing that out. Along the lines of "Any press is good press", perhaps any activity is better than no activity.[/quote]

And I am sure once that beta tag gets removed. The future competitions would have more preference on quality than quantity.

kamalakshantv

And if you have noticed the competition gives you double the points for wiki and forum activity. May be they want to test these modules thoroughly than any other.

mgran

You're on to something here, we do want to try this out - in addition to the holidays spirit of handing gear out. The amount of feedback in the Beta Forum has been high, also on quality. Especially on the Tag system and wiki features. Another step towards a better QtDevNet, cheers :)

Wolf P.

Marius, is there a way to determine, how the activity growth is distributed between wiki edits, tagging, posting, ... ?

mgran

@Wolf: It's all in the database, we aim to have a statistical review at some point. But not this soon.

disperso

I can't tell if there has been an increase in the amount of content, or a decrease in the SNR (because I'm a newbie), but I certainly can certainly say that I see a good amount of noise.

In general, I dislike forums, and I'm more inclined to use mailinglists, but given that it seems that many people like systems like this, and that QtDN is putting effort and resources, I'm giving it a try. And right now, the first impression is a little bit bad, sorry. :-( I'm not giving up on the whole thing yet, though.

Wolf P.

Forums - and mailinglists too - have the common property to be dominated by the communication process itself. I think as more results were taken to the wiki and the wiki structure gets improved step by step, the usability will increase.

kamalakshantv

[quote author="Wolf P." date="1291641645"]Forums - and mailinglists too - have the common property to be dominated by the communication process itself. I think as more results were taken to the wiki and the wiki structure gets improved step by step, the usability will increase.[/quote]

Yes it will take some time to build the wiki and forum and I feel things are moving at a good speed.

troubalex

It's time for me to jump in. Better late than never. ;)

We are experimenting here, you're right. An important part - at least in theory - of community building is to increase the base of active users. We are boosting this process with the current project. Naturally, the SNR will decrease during this period and I am aware of the fact that it may scare people. I am convinced though that things will calm down fairly soon.

I hope to see a growing number of active users that stick to the site to contribute useful content over time. For now, we are stress-testing our workflow and how well the features scale and which features are missing the most for a big user base. It takes time to implement new things and the sooner we start working on them the better.

In general, I have the feeling that overall it's going quite well - despite some quirks and hick-ups. Let me know if you don't agree. Oh, and if you have something to discuss that you'd prefer to handle in private, feel free to send me a message.

baysmith

Alexandra, thank you for the clarification. Now that the intention of Project Elf is more clear, I agree it is going quite well.

GordonSchumacher

I think that it's shaping up to be a very good system indeed; my only complaint presently is trying to figure out how to contribute is often difficult (is that really the only formatting possible on the wiki? no tables?!?)

But it already runs more smoothly than some of this sort of thing I've seen before!

DenisKormalev

Gordon, tables are avail in wiki. For example look "here":http://developer.qt.nokia.com/wiki/GettingStartedWithQtRussian .

Wolf P.

...as added to the "WikiSyntax":http://developer.qt.nokia.com/wiki/WikiSyntax help page :)

GordonSchumacher

[quote author="Wolf P." date="1291738187"]...as added to the "WikiSyntax":http://developer.qt.nokia.com/wiki/WikiSyntax help page :)[/quote]

Okay, now that was fast. I am clearly not all the way awake yet - my first thought was "I coulda sworn I just looked at that pa... ... oh yeah, it's a wiki." :-P

Thanks, although at the same time I also just noticed the "formatting by Textile" link, which I'd been looking for before too. Bah.

Wolf P.

I think this both should be merged into TextileSyntax or so. The WikiHelp should cover tipps rules for working in this wiki, syntax issues added as link for further reading.

What do you (all) think?

giesbert

That sounds good. It should be one entry for the syntax, which covers (almost) all posibilities. Whether that is Wiki Syntax (with two sections, one with the current content and then the textiles) or a separate page doesn't matter.

GordonSchumacher

Um. If I use the "|_. header |" format on a table, it looks correct in the page preview, but not once I hit "submit"! Buh...?