Re: Basic User Manual for Nabble

Posted by GregChapman on Feb 28, 2014; 1:12pm
URL: https://support.nabble.com/Basic-User-Manual-for-Nabble-tp7589558p7589599.html

Hi Mintrax,

Yes, Pedro's answer is a bit of a cop-out, but a full scale manual does take a lot of thinking about. (I know! I'm involved in documenting an open source plain text mail program, nPOPuk)...

What level of knowledge can you assume in your readers?
How much of the basic operation of a forum needs to be explained?
Should it just be an administrator's, or a more general user's guide?
What level of experience in setting up multi-user software/computers can you assume (even for an Administrators Guide)?

Currently, I have around 60 starred items in this forum which, when marked, I believed to be important options that can be coded within NAML or answers to FAQs. I now find myself regularly searching those posts for relevant terms within them before posting responses here.

If I can find the time - no promises about when - I'll create a new forum that collects, organises and edits those posts in an anonomised form, so that they could be imported into the support forum as locked reference material that I or the Nabble team could edit as additional FAQs emerge in the main Premium Support and Free Support forums.

Certainly, one of the things that would be worth asking for is that every visible new feature (as distinct from invisible bug fixes) is reported in the "Nabble Latest Features" sub-forum - not just the complete game-changers, as at the moment. I know Nabble makes almost weekly updates, some that make subtle, but important, changes to the user interface, with more radical changes every six months or so - often these are features initially added to specific forums in response to Premium Support requests and then later rolled out into the main product.