Date: Sat, 12 Jan 2008 15:34:33 +0100 From: Dominic Fandrey <kamikaze@bsdforen.de> To: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FreeBSD's problems as seen by the BSDForen.de community Message-ID: <4788CFF9.30500@bsdforen.de> In-Reply-To: <86y7av5fbt.fsf@ds4.des.no> References: <200801111917.m0BJHP8u018954@lurza.secnetix.de> <86y7av5fbt.fsf@ds4.des.no>
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Dag-Erling Smørgrav wrote: > Oliver Fromme <olli@lurza.secnetix.de> writes: >>>> (I don't even think bsdforen.de is the largest German BSD >>>> community, but that's a different story). >>> Even in case it's the second biggest forum, it shouldn't be ignored; >> I agree completely, it shouldn't be ignored. (Whether it's >> the first, second or third biggest forum doesn't matter at >> all; it can't be easily measured anyway.) > > BSDForen.de is a native-language forum, and I suspect it suffers from > the same problems as other native-language fora: they become closed > communities with little or no contact with the parent community, and > over time they construct their own mythology of how that community > functions and acts. Since so many of us are subscribed to these mailing lists, I feel quite confident about saying that we are neither disconnected nor have created a mythology. If you mean by disconnected the people who appear once and ask something that can be answered by telling them to read a certain chapter in the handbook or one of the 120 HowTos we have written and collected (I have offered to the doc-mailing list to translate some to English, but that has been ignored), then in deed we are guilty - of keeping lots of newbies with trivial questions from these lists. > I have seen this before - a complete disconnect between the reality of > the project and its perception by a native-language user group, > culminating in one case in a face to face "crisis meeting" between > members of that community and FreeBSD developers, and in another in a > flame war over an "open letter" from that user group to the developers. > Interestingly, both cases involved German-language communities. The flame-war is occurring here. It didn't happen on our forums. The first people to reply to the "open letter" did so in a very constructive fashion. They anticipated that our letter was the result of months long discussion and only described problems of senior community members, who all are subscribed to FreeBSD mailing lists. I personally have been flamed on IRC and received hate-mail, because I openly opposed translating developer documentation to German, because I think that such a translation favors a community split.
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