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Re: Proper Support Methods

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Proper Support Methods

by
LasLabs, Dave Lasley
- 19/08/2016 16:09:53
Hi All,

A conversation started in #190 regarding then proper consumers of our products should be taking in order to obtain help for those products. The conversation was a bit out of scope for the PR, so I am bringing it here now.

As it stands now, the desired avenue of support is not clear for OCA, which is causing confusion as well as a fracture of our resources. A few suggestions have been laid out; apologies if I missed anything:

OCA Help Forum

This proposed support avenue involves OCA hosting and maintaining a forum on odoo-community.org. All requests for help will be directed to these forums.

The advantage here is that the forums will be under our control, which will allow us to create automations and other integrations to systems we already have.

Disadvantage is that we will require administrators and moderators to manage this solution. It may also create an ambiguity of resources for newcomers, with two help forums “for Odoo”.

Odoo Help Forum

This solution utilizes the pre-existing Odoo help forum as an OCA help forum as well.

The advantage of this is that they already exist and have a decent amount of valuable info on them.

The disadvantage here is that I have not actually found anything helpful on these forums, and find the format atrocious. It seems there is consensus in the community regarding this.

Mailing Lists

This solution utilizes an OCA mailing list to provide a support avenue.

The advantage here is familiarity and ease of setup. We already have the mailing lists, and basically everyone knows how to use email.

The disadvantage is that the thread format of an email gets broken quite often, and the mailing list archives are essentially impossible to navigate. They will also avoid Google pretty well because of the Parent=>Child format of Odoo mailing lists.

Stack Overflow

This solution utilizes a subdomain, or tag on stack overflow for Odoo/OCA. 

The advantage here is again familiarity, and abundance of pre-existing resources.

The disadvantage is that StackOverflow is a purely technical, programming oriented Q&A forum. Simple theories or non-researched questions will be closed by the mods.