aaah, now I understand.
Now I also understand the cross posting message.
You see, we have a policy here to keep the number of threads dealing with a single issue to a minimum. This is easier for the one asking support (you only have to monitor one thread and not two or three), easier for people
giving support (they can see if a question has been answered or not), and easier for people looking for an answer in the forums (they don't have to look at too many differnt posts dealing with the same problem).
As
you can see here, you have started a couple of differnt threads about the same problem (for instance the shortcut module problem). That is what we consider cross posting, and the moderators deal with that by removing the double/cross posts. Of course they don't do this when more posts have been answered (as that would defeat the purpose of our policy
), and they notify the poster about this behaviour. Normally a '
please don't cross post your questions and keep to this thread' is sufficient.
As for getting decent support, we pride ourselves on being a friendly community that tries to provide as much suport as possible. However, there are a few things that everyone need to take into consideration when looking for immediate solutions (which isn't the same as support!): there are over 300 differnt 3rd party modules available for XOOPS, in various stages of activty, development and maturity. It is simply impossible to be able to provide high quality, 24hr immediate solutions to problems arrising for all or even many of these modules. Most of these modules were written for a specific purpose and don't have active developers looking after them.
That may not be the best way to deal with modules and that may disqualify XOOPS as the platform for your website, but that does not reflect badly on what the community does provide: quality support for
most support requests, given freely, voluntarily and motivated because people like to help their peers.
So if you get an answer quickly and accurately, that's a good thing. If you don't, it means you will have to look deeper yourself, or find the author and see if they are available to help.
I'm not going to say that because you got XOOPS for free you shouldn't expect anything, because we both know that is not true. You can expect a certain level of support from us (the community), and judging by the number of support posts I see in these forums, everyone is doing their best to help out. We cannot guarantee
full support however. That's just not in the nature of an open source community powered project. We don't have any paid staff, so we cannot force anyone to focus on a specific type of support and be available for anyone asking support.
That can be arranged tho, if you are willing to pay for the support...
Anyways, my point here is that I sympathise with your frustration (believe me, I've had my share of that!), but the solution I chose was not to reject the community, but to embrace it and help out myself with what I did learn, It soon became lots of fun to help out other with my meagre knowledge
. And I wanted you to take note of that perspective, and hope it will help you solve your support problems!
Herko
