[MPlayer-users] Documentation and dumb questions

[Alexander Werth (gmx)]

Am Fre, 2001-11-30 um 02.34 schrieb Dariusz Pietrzak:
> > p.s.: recommended doc reading is from "line 1" to "line last" .
> well.. that's the problem.
> This is not a nuclear reactor manuals.
> This is supposed to be movie player.
> And you can't seriously expect people to read the manuals ...
Actually for most software there are no manuals anymore. A few years ago
there were decent manuals for everything but this changed.
MPlayer is one of the few apps with a decent manual so users today don't
immediatly think of the documentation as a source of information.
And then, even if 99% of the questions are covered by the manual, You
need some experience with the mplayer manual to find what You are
looking for. Otherwise its easy to overlook things.
A search may help but You must know what to search for then.
> Have your read carefully 'man ls' before you first used 'ls' ?
No, but I use man ls when I have problems with this command.
man mplayer is a well used command but it won't help You every time.
>  Users need forum for users - somewhere where they can ask all those
> annoying useless questions, and where others which asked those questions
> before would answer them. This would solve two problems - first, a lot
> less annoyance for developers, and second - users would get the answer
> in language they can understand.
True. I also vote for a mplayer-newbies list and a strong warning to use
this first.
There should be a warning by the mplayer-users list: "Asking questions
that are in some way covered by the documentation will result in
insulting answers" or something like that.
Mplayer has grown and so has the user base. Why not make use of this
user base to let them help mplayer newbies.
Just like Dariusz said: where others which asked those questions before
would answer them. This would also allow mplayer beginners to give
something back to mplayer by giving support in the newbie mailinglist.
Alexander Werth

-- 
The right to read is a battle being fought today...
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html