How to get 100's of entries/month

["Aaron D. Turner" <aturner@pobox.com>]

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I've learned two things from the RHLUFAQ:

1)  Most people don't want to fill out a form from scratch

2)  Most people can't think of answers without first being asked a
question.  (Ie, they don't think of the answer and the problem.)

Anyways, if we want *lots* of entries- we need a way to overcome these two
problems.

Getting people to ask questions is *easy*.  Heck, I get people filling out
the RHLUFAQ form asking questions even though I clearly state 3 times that
it's not for that.  But even if we allow people to fill out a form and ask
questions, that not enough.

So then it sorta hit me.  There's a number of places on the internet where
people ask questions and people answer them.  It happens 1000's of times
each day.  Support mailling lists.

What if we had an email address, that *anyone* could forward their answer
to.  Ie, Joe asks a question on the redhat-list.  Mike answers Joe, and
cc's: submit@linuxkb.org.  Then if Mike has an account with us, the email
gets parsed and dropped into a table for him (scan the from: header) to
come back, edit, and submit to the site.  If Mike doesn't have one, it
goes into a general delivery (perhaps we have these seperated by
distribution) for someone else to edit and submit.

Have a job that scan's the user specific table looking for old (more than
15 days?) entries and moves them in the general delivery table.

I can almost guarantee, if we do this we'll see a 10x increase in
submissions in the first month.

Anyways, I prototyped (a rather poor hack actually) something like this
for the RHLUFAQ.  If you check out:
http://www.best.com/~aturner/RedHat-FAQ/ADDMGR/
you'll get an idea what I'm talking about.  

What do people think?

- -- 
Aaron Turner           | Either which way, one half dozen or another. 
aturner@pobox.com      | Check out the Red Hat Linux User's FAQ Online!
www.pobox.com/~aturner | http://www.pobox.com/~aturner/RedHat-FAQ/
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