This section contains questions pertaining to site administration of GNU Mailman.



Comments

Duncan Drury

This section used to have numbers for each question, and a LOT of archived mailing list questions are answered with "See FAQ question 4.29" then link to this page. 

But this page does not have numbered questions, nor are the questions in numerical order any more.  This makes it hard to find answers to questions that could otherwise be easily answered by a search in Google or the mailing list.

Duncan Drury

Ok - in the spirit of the wiki, I went in and added the numbers back in to the page titles.  I added leading 0's to the early numbers as the wiki sorts alphabetically.  Hope this is useful to others.

Terri Oda

Hm. I specifically left the numbers out of the titles when I converted the FAQ because I figured they made it harder for people to find the things they wanted when browsing the list of entries, and anyone who wanted to find FAQ 4.3 or whatever could just search...

Duncan Drury

That could be true, but doing a search (or asking a question of a mailing list) then getting an answer that then has to be resolved by doing a further search is a step too far for me.  And removing the numbers still leaves a list where most of the questions begin with "How do".

IMHO the numbers are more useful in the list than they are in the articles themselves.  Although, having put them back in I see that the numbers don't imply any order to the actual FAQs.  Breaking up this list into different categories might be useful, but I'm not sure how to achieve that with this wiki system.

Terri Oda

Yeah, the numbers only provide info on when an entry was added. It's useful historically, and because people have in the past referred to FAQ entries by their numbers, but somewhat counter productive when it comes to grouping information. I figured people were better off with just titles so they wouldn't assume any ordering. (edit: Plus, you don't have a whole pile of pages that start with "4..." in the dashboard change listing...)

I'd love to see someone organize the FAQ into better sub-categories. We've just had the wiki software upgraded, so there may be better tools for this now.

Duncan Drury

What would be super cool would be some way of forwarding links from the old FAQ sections to the new ones - everyones bookmarks now get forwarded to the front page of the FAQs.  Again - having the numbers in the list allows one to look at the old URL and figure out where the page they are looking for is.

Agree that some better organisation would be useful.  Maybe I'll roll up my sleeves one of these days.

MailmanWiki: DOC/4 Site administrator tasks (last edited 2021-04-21 01:26:33 by msapiro)