Dolphin manual and support - noticable by its absence
BirdTribes
posted 2nd of February 2008
in
Community Voice.
5 comments.
Hi
Okay here goes...
Ive been a Dolphin owner for about 4 months now.
Ive never done anything like this before and I am not a programmer - Im a visual artist.
So its been a pretty steep learning curve fixing the rough edges and installing a few mods.
I understand that Andrey and the team do a fantastic job creating all this for us
and I understand that with open source projects support and manuals are often non existant - however ...
I think that not having a manual, and having a frustrating lack of support even in the contributors forum... is going to slow down and limit the potential growth of Dolphin as 'the worlds most advanced free community software' !
I notice some people are asking support questions here in their blogs which seems to me to detract from the attention given to answering problems on the forum where you are supposed to go to get answers.
From what I can see there have been fewer answers from Boonex staff on the forum lately. I have about 8 unanswered questions slowly going moldy there at the moment.
And its remarkable how some questions that were asked many months ago never get answered by anyone.
I also note the wonderful new initiative at www.boonexnerd.com by Jtadeo - a fantastic step in the right direction for helping beginners get a grip on their new Dolphins flippers.
I also note that before I bought Dolphin and Ray and paid for the installation by Boonex I was told that there was a manual for a previous version of Dolphin and that it would be updated eventually. Ha. Well I guess that was my initiation into the vaporware of open source manuals !
So what does all this come down to... ? Just a gripe session about not being able to get quick answers to relitively simple questions about basic functionality ? Well yes I guess so :-)
But I would like also to get a feel for what is in the works to begin to address this issue? Is Dolphin always going to be for Nerds or will there come a time when mere human beings are able with a bit of work to figure out how to add a background pic to the homepage without waiting in the forum for someone to take pity on them ?
Anyway Id better get back to trying to solve my multitude of community portal problems and stop wasting time writing this blog. ;-)
Great to be part of the community guys !
Dan V
Below is the legacy version of the Boonex site, maintained for Dolphin.Pro 7.x support.
The new Dolphin solution is powered by UNA Community Management System.
The new Dolphin solution is powered by UNA Community Management System.
You may participate in making them better. If you become a Pundit, you will get access to WIKI editing. Even as it is now - it's one of the more detailed manuals compared to competition. We still add and tweak it sometimes though. Suggestions welcome.
As for support... that has been a problem from day ..10 I'd say. We have a comparatively small team, yet thousands of users and that's why we always encourage community see more
Love the software, just wish there was online manual where one could go to get info on how to do this and that...