restarting our FAQ

[Dirk Hohndel]

We used to have a wiki which I shut down when I averaged 50 spam user creations and more than a thousand attempted spam posts a day.
I spent more time trying to deal with that than with Subsurface itself.

Maybe that's better with GitHub wikis. Who knows.

I am ok with saying that the FAQ is English only.

I haven't spent any time at all on the GitHub wiki setup to know how easily we could curate this and more importantly how easily one can create useful deep links to specific answers that could be posted into email / the forum. I understand very well how to manage submissions to the GitHub.io page through PRs.
I need to spend time to understand how that would work with the wiki. Because the very last thing I need on earth is another time sucking task.

I'd still likely be leaning towards just a set of markdown pages on the GitHub.io site instead of a wiki - but that's mainly because I haven't done the work to investigate how that would really work.

I guess another task to add to my list, eh?

/D

> On Feb 8, 2022, at 11:51 AM, Crawford Currie wrote:
> 
> Do you really need to translate the FAQ? FAQs are normally used to try to stop support channels from getting choked with trivia. I see questions on the subsurface forum <https://groups.google.com/u/1/g/subsurface-divelog> falling into three broad categories:
> questions that should be answered by RTFM
> questions that relate to specific hosts / dive computers
> questions that are too deep for the doc
> - RTFM questions should be addressed by accessible, easy to consume documentation, and the project already does that really well,
> 
> - Deep questions is what I think the forum should really be about, which leaves:
> 
> - Specific hosts / dive computers. This is a constantly moving target, as dive computer tech moves forward apace, and trying to maintain a translated FAQ for the dozens of brands and models out there does not sound like an efficient use of developer or translator time.
> 
> Personally I'm not a fan of tablets-of-stone FAQs anyway, as they rarely answer my questions and just end up being a source of frustration. What is frequently asked today may not be so frequently asked next year - but the answers to last year's questions may still be relevant to someone.
> 
> For long-tail projects like Subsurface, I much prefer the stackoverflow approach, where answers can come from anyone and spam is dealt with by user moderation. Failing that, a wiki (again with user moderation) can also work, though it requires more work from the dev team to define and maintain an effective taxonomy.
> 
> With respect to translation, anyone seriously looking for answers is quite capable of pasting into Google Translate. ;-)
> 

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