Joomla! Discussion Forums

I'd like to suggest live support on a free basis be provided here at this site via a web-based chat system. I think that there are enough willing participants here to make this possible. The FAQ could be generated very quickly with real frequently asked questions! These common issues could easily be dealt with by pointing the users to the related FAQ item. If a user needed more explanation, it would be obvious that the FAQ answer would need to be more specific, detailed, etc.

Choosing who would provide the support might be on a donation basis. Since this is a global community, 24/7 support would be possible. Also, if support wasn't avail that wouldn't be a big deal - just provide a link to the FAQ and how to post to the forum.

Thoughts?

We do have a general irc channel for discussion related issues:

http://forum.opensourcematters.org/inde ... 101.0.html

Perhaps an #osmsupport channel needs to be created?

You can embed a java based irc chat client within the website that way people don't have to purchase/install a stand-alone client if they don't want to.

Yes, I'm aware and often logged into the existing IRC channel.  I'd like to see a better system for providing support that is more one-on-one than IRC. Many companies use them, usually in their sales department. We might even be the first open source community to provide support in this manner. We need to do everything we can to ensure the $ambo community of the new project's stability! This could really be a huge plus for the new project. That's my $0.08.

using IRC you can do one on one support, but not everybody can use IRC due problems with ports being disabled

there are not many web based solutions for chatting, but there are few $ambo related, you can check components like mos-chat, simplechat etc.

Agreed. I'd like to hear input from OSM team members on this. Is OSM interested in allowing the community to provide one-on-one support in this manner?

My latest info is that, core dev team is making those decisions and at the moment they do not plan it

Read topic http://forum.opensourcematters.org/index.php/topic,101.15.html


_________________
Peter Saitz
www.blastchat.com

I'm not part of the team, so can't say what they might think 
However, I don't support live chat support here. One of the things that built the old forum into (what was) a very good resource was that support requests were posted, anybody that wanted to could respond, and the threads remained there for searching.  One-on-one does not give others the opportunity to see what the questions/answers were, and to correct anything.  How often have we seen someone post code, for example, that someone else comes along and says, "could be done better this way", or "that would cause unintended problems with xxxx..."?
We are a community with a wide variety of experience in all sorts of different areas.  In my opinion, the best way to utilise the combined resources of this community is by encouraging people to use this forum.

agree. fourm is the way forward. if you want to chat to someone check if they have put in an icq number or they're msn name. if they have that suggests to me they are happy for you to contact that way.

1-on-1 is useless. Then the one responding has to do the searching.