im sorry to say im leaving xoops. it seemed like just what i was looking for. but, i had an error during an installation and when i asked the community in specifics what this message meant, i was pointed to a long list of faq questions that didnt apply to me. i didnt find an answer, and dont expect anyone to help me. i just wanted to say that you lost a customer because of the ill-support.
ps im currently looking at mambo
tamerlane

Wow, in 2 days time, without much information about the error you got, and with some general pointers to our primary resources of support information you think this is ill-support. That's your call of course

Anyways, good luck with mambo and their support community!

Herko

Wow.

You ask a question, get an answer within 11 minutes and don't report back that it was not helping. That's bad support? How should we know that it didn't help, when you don't tell us?

I do hope you will find what you are looking for in Mambo. There are much worse systems than that and if you get it installed, I am sure you will find it to be a good system. Just like I'm sure you would have found XOOPS to be a good system, if it had been installed successfully.

I'm sorry that it didn't work for you and wish you best of luck in the future.

Edit: Just to clarify: My "Wow" was in no way connected to Herko's - I just took longer to write the reply

It can sometime be very frustrating when working with a new system.

The teams and users that support this project do so because they are good natured and want to give back to the community. Most of the people that support and develop the XOOPS project do not expect any monetary rewards. Maybe a small amount of recognition to the community for their hard work, but that’s about it..

When you registered and downloaded these files, you became part of a great community of professional and mature developers, college kids, and people just looking for something fun to do with their time.

Your first problem was coming in thinking your a customer,
your second problem was not fully explaining the problem, your third problem was not letting anyone know the solution given to you did not solve your problem.
(Did you even look???)

If you want to be treated like a customer contract out one of the developers.

If you stick with xoops, hoooray!! Otherwise....till that attitude changes...good riddance and good luck with Mambo..

blah.. some people expect you to do everything for them including reading in some cases..

maybe XOOPS should only hire registered Telepaths in future to save on the users having to read docs and actually ask the right questions..

Doesn´t this thread show only the more mainstream users attracted lately?

Like some other threads in the very recent past ...

In one breath you say;
Quote:

But in the next you say;
Quote:

So you somehow expect to get support without anyone helping you ?

You got a reply giving a suggested course of action 11 minutes after posting (you CAN'T pay for that kind of response time), and you posted once.

If you're the kind of person who finds this to be "ill-support" then I can promise you that you are going to be disapointed with a great many things in life.

With any business/organisation there are customers that you want, and customers you don't want. Enjoy using Mambo, it is a great product just as XOOPS is.

Let's be honest, a fair amount of posts go by that never get a reply or the person gets help. While I am not defending him or disagreeing with him at the core he has a point. Thankfully I am tech savvy enough to get by if I dont get answers.

For the record, I have asked -several- questions myself over the course of the past 6 months+ that I did not find answers to via the faq/search and got ZERO helpful replies, if a reply at all. So I can certainly relate to his issue. If your first impression is the feeling of getting blown off what real motivation is there to stay?

So lets stop belitting every person that says theres a support issue. Certainly this topic seems to come up at least every week on these forums, rather then tossing it aside as seems to be the SOP eventually you have to sit back and say 'hhmmm MAYBE theres something we can do different/better as this keeps coming up.'

My 2 coppers

@Rhomal

Can you provide links to these questions you did not get answers to? From what I observe it is very rare that a post gets out of the most recent topics block without getting answered, and the ones that do are more often than not require quite involved answers, or are very scant on details.

In the case of tamerlane he posted ONCE giving vauge problem details. All he said was XOOPS said his directory was writable but it wouldn't write, and that he wasn't using Linux. That is NOT enough information to give any kind of specific/targeted answer. Considering the lack of detail given I think Carnuke gave a very professional response. Then less than 2 days later tamerlane posts again, not in reply to his original question to try and help us help him to solve his problem, but to criticize our community for not giving support he did not ask for. That is an unreasonable expectation no matter which way you try and put it.

I am not o programmer nor a developer.
I know some things about internet technologies and I can alter only ready stuctured code.

These mean that I am something of a middle user that spends lots of hours on the net, good at the "theorie of web information and content management" but not a pro in programming.

Actually I am a law student.I am very interested on the subject "law&web". And I can tell you all only one thing: XOOPS and all open source projects are non commercial. They are all released by the GPL or other clones of it.

This simply means that THERE IS NO CLIENT-SELLER relationship and everyhting relies on what we call in law "GOOD WILL".

So, no-one has the obligation to offer support here. I mean it, no-one!!! Not mithrandir, not herko, nor any other XOOPS developer. I haven't read anything about professional support or anything that has to do with a contract-relationship in the desclaimer. Right?

The community can be critisized of course and the comments are not always positive. The support can be good or bad, but it is not REQUIRED. Comments must be welcome and they can be ANSWERED of course.

On the other hand from my little experience on XOOPS, I must drop a few words: It is the only cms system that makes possible every little thought of ours. I've been the administrator on some sites with phpbb plus, with phpnuke or some other cms systems. The stability and reliability of XOOPS is really remarkable and that's why I prefer it.

And remember, I do not do nor make core programming.
I just modify templates and themes to fit them in my needs. I manage, not develop and I can judje from the "end user's" aspect of view.

So mambo is too chaotic and too advanced if one can't manage with XOOPS. The only benefits of mamabo are the non-block content organising systems. The more complicated it gets the more problems you get...

So, feel free to use XOOPS, feel free to leave it. The rest of us just keep offering to the community whatever we can.

That's my point of view.