Re: How to get 100's of entries/month

[Micah Yoder <LYoder@cyberis.net>]

"Aaron D. Turner" wrote:

> 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.

VERY good idea!

We'll need to find two or three people in each list that are the "answer
guys" for that list.  Every list seems to have them.  If we can get them
to cooperate, this will go rather smoothly.

Hopefully they themselves will edit the message to fit the form of a
KB.  But I'm sure we'll need plenty of volunteers, as not everyone will
do it perfectly.

We COULD also scan the mailing lists directly, at least to start, but
there's always the issue of stealing someone else's answers without
their permission.  Are mailing lists public domain?  If we find a
question and answer, can we swipe it, edit it to fit the KB form and fix
spelling/grammatical errors, and put it in the KB?  Do we need their
permission?

Should we start getting these people on board NOW?

As promised, I subscribed to the PHP list and am monitoring it.  I also
read PostgreSQL-general, so I could monitor and swipe things from those
lists if appropriate.  I could also contact the "answer guys" and get
them on board.

BTW, I also got a regex for E-mail verification from the PHP list
archives!  I fixed a couple problems with my signup form, but there's
still a problem so I haven't put it in CVS yet.