Judge Email FAQ
Chris Babcock
The first draft of the Judge Email FAQ is now available:
http://www.asciiking.com/diplomacy/jefaq.html
Comments, feedback and suggestions sought.
Chris
Eric Hunter
Chris,
Your last FAQ is "Is there anything so totally obvious that
it mentioned above?". In the Answer section, the crucial
"is not" is not missing.
In terms of formatting, I think left and right margins would
improve the readability of the answers.
In the answer to, "The judge is working, but I'm not getting mail.
What do I do?", you wrote, "Check your sent items to be sure you
are sending things to the right address for the judge, which may
also be able to check on the Openings List." There is a problem
in your phrasing, I think.
Eric.
--
Chris Babcock
> Your last FAQ is "Is there anything so totally obvious that
> it mentioned above?". In the Answer section, the crucial
> "is not" is not missing.
>
> In terms of formatting, I think left and right margins would
> improve the readability of the answers.
>
> In the answer to, "The judge is working, but I'm not getting mail.
> What do I do?", you wrote, "Check your sent items to be sure you
> are sending things to the right address for the judge, which may
> also be able to check on the Openings List." There is a problem
> in your phrasing, I think.
I blame my wife, who was rushing me to get online for her vampire RPG,
for everything but the margins. I made some changes to the style sheet
that worked for that page, but display differently elsewhere on the
site. I know what the issue is, but I'm making some global changes to
the site over the next few months so it will just have to wait on that.
Any other screw ups or any comments on the content itself?
Chris
Jim Burgess
I thought it looked very user friendly and readable, kudos!
The only thing I thought you could add possibly was a bit of "hierarchy"
to some of the responses, e.g. if you're not getting mail, your first step
is how to assess if the Judge is working, then if you find the Judge is
working, then you look at your sent mail and match the address, then you
go to the openings list to see if that is being updated, or something like
that. But that would be tweaking and might be hard to implement.
Jim-Bob
Chris Babcock
> I thought it looked very user friendly and readable, kudos!
Thank you.
> The only thing I thought you could add possibly was a bit of
> "hierarchy" to some of the responses, e.g. if you're not getting
> mail, your first step is how to assess if the Judge is working, then
> if you find the Judge is working, then you look at your sent mail and
> match the address, then you go to the openings list to see if that is
> being updated, or something like that. But that would be tweaking
> and might be hard to implement.
I could have done it as a "how-to" instead of a FAQ, since the material
is currently very linear in its presentation. Someone who is not
receiving mail from the judge would do well to start at the beginning
and work their way down in the order the material is presented.
The FAQ doesn't address any other issue right now except that of a user
not getting mail from the judge. There are two other complete sets of
issues with email to the judge in multipart/alternative MIME and
non-standard character sets. That could become dated very quickly if a
server-side solution was devised that could be easily implemented on
the variety of judge platforms.
Chris
Jim Burgess
>Thank you.
>Chris
I understand, this is just a suggestion if you were to keep building it.
Jim-Bob
Chris Babcock
> >> The only thing I thought you could add possibly was a bit of
> >> "hierarchy" to some of the responses, e.g. if you're not getting
> >> mail, your first step is how to assess if the Judge is working,
> >> then if you find the Judge is working, then you look at your sent
> >> mail and match the address, then you go to the openings list to
> >> see if that is being updated, or something like that. But that
> >> would be tweaking and might be hard to implement.
>
> >I could have done it as a "how-to" instead of a FAQ, since the
>
> >(There are two other complete sets of issues with email to the judge
> >in multipart/alternative MIME and non-standard character sets.)
>
> I understand, this is just a suggestion if you were to keep building
> it.
Actually, that's backwards... If I was not going to build it then I
would have done it as a How-to (made the fact that it is step by step
more explicit). Since I am likely to address some other issues as
well, I chose the FAQ format.
What I'm likely to do, and I'm thanking you for the inspiration, is
maintain it in sections. The part that's currently written will be
"What to do if you stop receiving mail from the judge." The other two
part would be "I don't understand these error messages." The 2 problems
with malformatted mail to the judge aren't that different from a user's
perspective, just from the perspective of the server.
Chris
Jim Burgess
>Chris
Hi Chris, sorry for being so dense in communication, that's what I meant
you should do in "building it", I was only suggesting that you be a bit
more obvious about sequential pieces of advice between each section. I
think it ALWAYS is the case that if you write the FAQ from the perspective
that the USER has you are better off. They don't know what they don't
know (you know this, I'm just explicitly pointing it out).
Jim-Bob