Both the Haiku web site and the forum need to have a publicly accessable list of contact information so that people can contact team leads, webmasters and forum administrators. I spent 4 days trying to register for this forum and could not. It should not be difficult to contact any of the leaders of this project.
I realize that reducing spamming is a major concern these days, the lack of contact info is not good for this project.
As for the team leads, it’s their responsibility to put their contact info on their team page. Otherwise, post in the appropriate forums for the team to get contact established.
As for the administrators, our emails are all over the place. Every news post or newsletter article contains an email address. But I understand the need to consolidate all of the emails… And as you stated, the problem with that is spam… lots of it. I get about 200 emails a day, most of which are filtered into my junk mail by Thunderbird.
As for the team leads, it's their responsibility to put their contact info on their team page. Otherwise, post in the appropriate forums for the team to get contact established.As for the administrators, our emails are all over the place. Every news post or newsletter article contains an email address. But I understand the need to consolidate all of the emails… And as you stated, the problem with that is spam… lots of it. I get about 200 emails a day, most of which are filtered into my junk mail by Thunderbird.
I as well have had this problem.
One could garble the email in the page and have a javascript “decode”. It’d be a simple regex to implement. A lot of people do this, they put at instead of a @ and just search/replace it with javascript. Of course the at could be any random letter combination to minimize the possibility of people having the “to be replaced” thing in there email address.
As for the team leads, it's their responsibility to put their contact info on their team page. Otherwise, post in the appropriate forums for the team to get contact established.As for the administrators, our emails are all over the place. Every news post or newsletter article contains an email address. But I understand the need to consolidate all of the emails… And as you stated, the problem with that is spam… lots of it. I get about 200 emails a day, most of which are filtered into my junk mail by Thunderbird.
Kurtis,
How is one supposed to post in the forum if one can’t register for the forum??
Where are the email addresses listed in the newsletters?
It took me five days to register for this forum! My problem was that I could not register for the forum because I have a yahoo web-mail account and the entire yahooDOTcom domain has been banned. I searched for any forum administators to email and found your address and sent you an email. It was returned with the error that yahoo could not form an SMTP connection. I then tried senting emails to admin and webmaster AT haiku-os.org and these were returned for the same reason. Next, I attempted to register for the openbeos maillist, but was having trouble registering there also. I then went to the #haiku IRC channel to ask if anyone knew the address of any of the haiku-os.org admins or members.It was a day or so before Fredrick responded and was kind enough to forward one of my emails to the list. I tried once again to register for this forum using two email aliases the point to my yahoo account and that also failed. A day later Micheal Phillips emailed me to clarify why my email was banned from this forum and asked if he could help. I replied telling him exactly what I have just detailed here.The next day me had to manually add me to this forum and the openbeos mailing list.
It should not take so much effort to sign up for a forum!!!
I am all for preventing spam. However, making it nearly impossible to contact the forum aministrator or the leaders of this project is not helpful. I fact it is harmful. We need to embrace new users, not frustrate them.
Where are the email addresses listed in the newsletters?
On the font page or while viewing a News Article:
While viewing a Newsletter:
It took me five days to register for this forum! My problem was that I could not register for the forum because I have a yahoo web-mail account and the entire yahooDOTcom domain has been banned.
Our intention is not to keep people out of the project, believe me. That is completely counter-productive to our cause. But the decision to block certain email domains was a group decision and it was decided that in the end, it would be best for the project… not to make people mad.
I searched for any forum administators to email and found your address and sent you an email. It was returned with the error that yahoo could not form an SMTP connection.
My server has been having problems lately, but it has never been without backup. If it was sent back, there must have been something really wrong, since my DNS service will catch all of my emails for me if my email server goes down. I apologize for the server downtime though, but being part of a small company, it is difficult to keep it up continuously.
I then went to the #haiku IRC channel to ask if anyone knew the address of any of the haiku-os.org admins or members.
PM’ing one of the ops is usually the best way to get attention in the channels, since most people are usually just idle. I’m on almost continuously as “zortness”. If you need anything, PM me.
A day later Micheal Phillips emailed me to clarify why my email was banned from this forum and asked if he could help.
A simple forum search would have yeilded a couple of conversations about this that went on earlier. But no matter what, if you have no other email than x@yahoo.com, an admin would have had to add you manually.
http://haiku-os.org/forums/search.php
Searching for “email banned” returns a few things to look through.
It should not take so much effort to sign up for a forum!!!
I agree completely, but your case seems extremely rare. Every other email I’ve recieved concerning the forum seems to be that the confirmation email was not properly sent for some reason or another, which is just as easily fixed.
I am all for preventing spam. However, making it nearly impossible to contact the forum aministrator or the leaders of this project is not helpful. I fact it is harmful. We need to embrace new users, not frustrate them.
Once again, believe me, our intention is not to frustrate anyone. Everyone works on the project because they believe in it, not because anyone gets paid to or because they like dealing with people even. The only way to bring in useful people is to make them feel welcome and useful. But once again, simple search engines could have saved you much frustration, as all of the administrator’s names show up on thousands of web sites, including my own name and information.
http://www.google.com/search?q=michael+phipps
http://www.google.com/search?q=darkwyrm
http://www.google.com/search?q=axel+dorfler
http://www.google.com/search?q=kurtis+kopf
I apologize if that seems rude, but it always amazes me when someone says they cannot find information about something on the web.
And once again, I’m sorry about the inconvenience, we’re all trying to provide more information on the web site, but it is a team effort and takes quite a bit of time to gather all of the appropriate information. What you see here is a culmination of over a year’s work for myself and the rest of the team.
Also, one thing you may want to look out for: To my understanding, someone is going to be making a haiku mail service quite soon. So keep your eyes peeled for that.
P.S.
I almost forgot… There’s also those little buttons at the bottom of every post for contacting the person who posted the message. Mine is particularly full.
There is also the mailing list which every admin is on … so you can also contact them that way.