The same questions keep appearing in the forums.
I can't find it now, but I believe I read a suggestion recently that there be a FAQ or some such link. This seems to me to be very important, as I, who answer many fewer than others, find I am getting irritated and am stopping answering the same old questions, again and again. This will, of course, add to the load of those who continue to take up the chore.
I highly support some form of FAQ which MAY relieve some of the repetitive load.
Best regards to everyone.
Comments
Here it is:
http://musescore.org/en/node/10624
-- J.S.
I think the problem is that there is no obvious way for newbies to *find* the info that exists in documents like John's writeup or the various tutorials that exist, or even to figure out where to look in the handbook for the relevant info (no one realizes what "Voices" is actually about). I still think having a "Documentation" or similarly-named link instead of "Handbook" on the main musescore.org menu, that went to a page with links to the handbook, John's document, and various tutorials, is the way to go. I know Thomas & company have been very busy with other concerns (eg, the recently released iPad app for musescore.com: http://musescore.org/en/node/11110). I know Nicolas in particular is also hard at work on the 1.1 release. Lots of things all coming together at once here, but this does seem like the right time to update this aspect of the site. I'm planning to help as I can.
I discussed this with lasconic and we think the best way forward is to make a FAQ page in the handbook, which answers many of the recurring questions as short as possible. Here it is: http://musescore.org/en/handbook/faq
The overhaul for the documentation section on musescore.org will be done after the MuseScore 1.1 release. Sorry, priorities & focus ;-)
In reply to FAQ by Thomas
This is a great project. Your response helps give me patience to dive back in.
Good luck with the commercial side.
Regards,
In reply to FAQ by Thomas
Good call; thanks for creating the FAQ page!
In reply to Good call; thanks for by Marc Sabatella
I would just respectfully suggest that there be a prominent link to that FAQ on the main page of the website. There are lots of links on the upper-right for the handbook, search, etc., with answers to many of the most-asked questions, but people still post first and look later. I know that when I see "FAQ" on the first page of a website, that immediately draws my attention, so if it was very visible, maybe that would curtail some of the repeat questions.
In reply to FAQ by Thomas
It appears that when people search on the net for an answer, they often search for 'how to do X'. Websites such as ehow.com, wikihow.com, answers.com played in on this trend and are attracting quite some traffic. The answers on these websites follow a typical formatting style:
Somehow, snippets are coming very close to this formatting, but perhaps because of the geeky naming (naming) and the not so well formalized usage of snippets, it didn't take off. So my proposal now would be to overhaul snippets, call it FAQs and see how it goes from there.
One extra thingy, FAQ's will receive a few extra optional fields:
In reply to transforming snippets to faqs by Thomas
I agree, the term "snippets" is obscure, but the basic function is pretty much exactly what one would like to see in an FAQ anyhow. The main thing needed would be a top level index, as the list of these would (hopefully) soon get too long to want to just scroll through to find what you want.
Something that Finale provides that could be useful is a "visual index" - an artificially complex demo score that contain examples of almost all features, labeled with the name of the feature so you can find it in the regular index. Of course, this could better be done online with actual links (maybe Finale does this too). I'd like to put something like that together at some point.
In reply to I agree, the term "snippets" by Marc Sabatella
it might be worth setting up a "key-word search facility" that ONLY searches the "FAQ".
Regards,
I deleted the handbook faq page I made earlier. Instead, I changed the snippets to a howto alike page. You can see them all on http://musescore.org/en/howto
You can edit all the howto pages and add one yourself. The current entries need to edited so the title is formulated as a How to ... question and the answer should use ordered list markup:
<ol>
<li></li>
</ol>
Once the editing is done, I will add the howto page in the menu.
In reply to FAQ -> HowTo by Thomas
Looking good! If you get some of them going in the format you want so we can see what they should look like, I'm sure we can collectively edit the rest and start on the process of adding more.