Re: [PHP-DOC] Errata notes... the end of the world is nigh From: Ron Chmara (ron <email protected>)
Date: 08/02/00

Daniel Beckham wrote:
> Ok.. I've been going through the MySQL errata for a few days now and I'm
> flabbergasted at how much of the errata is utterly useless stuff like "HELP
> A NEWBIE" or "Why can't I connect to an Amiga web server?". 99% of the
> errata notes are useless.

Yup. I see the task in handling those to be dual, where I look for the
_answers_, "sanitize" them so they are not in question/response form, and
then delete the question... the idea being that if the answer is there,
the question is less likely to be re-asked. One way of looking at it is
that many of the questions are "requests" for the documentation to be
clearer, to have more examples, or to have clearer commenting (or
commentary) in the examples.... they are asking for more documentation,
in a way.

Some other general observations on the pages I've cleaned:
1. Complex functions have more questions.
2. When questions are clearly ignored, less questions are posted in followups
(and the reverse is also true.)
3. Many questions arise out of confusion about not just the function itself,
but using the function in combination with other functions (questions about
a db function's use that turn out to really be about syntax for stripslashes(),
for example)
4. Many questions could be answered by the users themselves if more manual
cross-referencing existed, of the form:
See also xxx,yyy,zzzz

Indeed, a large chunk of the good posts I've seen are the equivalent of:
"look into this function over here, instead, or in addition" in response
to "HELP!!!this function isn't doing what I want!!!"

> The only thing that I can think of is that people are thinking that the
> errata section is a slashdot style comment forum.

Well... that could be built and hosted too, and I think the PHP community
has already done exactly that on other sites...

> I know that the errata
> form has a blurb about not using it as a support forum, but personally, I
> think the following HTML should be inserted at the top.
> <H7>THIS IS NOT A SUPPORT FORUM!</H7>
> <BR>If you have any form of a question in your comment, it will most likely
> be funneled to /dev/null.

Another possible solution to this is to use that page section to direct
them to more web-forums that do exist, more mailing lists, other tutorials,
etc.

-Bop 

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