Question Administration manual?

sozzled wrote: So, you do not have to convince us of the benefits of writing such documentation.

sozzled wrote: No-one needs to convince me that we could reduce the number of questions asked if all possible questions could be summarised, analysed, diagnosed and dealt with in a comprehensive one-size-fits-all packaged solution.

Ok, happy to know this!
I wrote that 'cause many people (sometimes producing great and amazing software tools) uses the "forum approach". I mean... if you ask "where is documentation?", "where is the support?", the answer is always the same: "look at our forum". In my experience, 99% of times, you could search and search again across the forum but... the answer you was looking for is absolutely not there. If you post a message, you must wait two or three days to receive an answer. 50% (or more)of times you will not receive an answer at all...
Since this approach has became so common in last times, users have a negative impression from who tell them the genric phares "look at our forum". The psycological feedback is the same of receiving an answer like "solve your problem by yourself".
Obviously, I'm not talking about Kunena, the forum is fantastic and you (and all of the other moderators) are offering a great support service!

sozzled wrote: Eventually we agreed that we needed a new Wiki approach

Yes, I mean that you should make more easy for people to collaborate with Kunena for writing docs. In my opinion, the wiki should be arranged as a logic tree (more easy to navigate).

sozzled wrote: Writing documentation is not a very rewarding job....

Yeah! I know... sometimes is the last task when the software has been completed. But, after the work of creating the tool is done... no one wants to spend more time... ehehehe :lol:
Maybe the documentation should concern what is fixed and stable along time (administration manual, user manual) and could be "easily" created by no-specialized people too.
More "specialized" docs should be writed by programmers and/or collaborators. Nevertheless, I think that there are many users tha could execute this task too. I see more than 17.000 people online now, so maybe there are two or three persons availible for writing specialized docs too. Is a statistical matter.

sozzled wrote: donate money so that we could employ a team of professional writers

By the way, I'm not a rich person, but the same I would donate some dollars for Kunena. Why there is no banner in the homepage?

Finally, let me say that the Kunena-team is doing a great job!!!

p.s: By the way, I'm available to write small parts of the admin docs. (After re-organization of the wiki )

I installed your forum - when I went to research instructions of some things I see you are giving instructions on the old version.

What good is that?

I've been trying to figure out several things - found them by trial and error.

I'm still trying to figure out how to change my forum default page.

G'day, max5ty, welcome to Kunena and thank you for your feedback.

I thoroughly agree with you, with all the points that you've made.

What would really assist us a lot more is if we could have a list of the top 10 most sought-after pieces of information that people are looking for and, if we concentrate on that list, we would not have as many questions or complaints. I know that I have asked this question on more times than I care to remember. What are the top 10 most sought-after pieces of information that people are looking for, that they would like explained, and then we can make significant progress on this activity.

Until we know what are those most important things, we're tackling the Wiki in an ad hoc, piecemeal way and I hope you will understand that we can't do everything all at the one time. I know that's not much of an answer to your general question but it's about the best I can give you at this time.

I was trying for ever to figure out how to add a section.

The wiki documentation was giving me instructions for an older version - it was telling me to:

"Go to the Joomla Backend, then to Kunena Configuration (Components -> Kunena Forum -> Kunena Configuration) and select Forum Administration (See image at right)."

There is no forum administration in the new version.

I finally figured out how to add a section - but the instructions to set your default page are also for an older version - I'm still trying to figure it out.

Yes, you're right, there is no "Forum Administration" in K 1.6 and for some people that might be a problem.

The terminology changed around the time of K 1.5.9 when we found that the term "forum" was too easily confused with the mechanisms that manage categories. Thus, the replacement for "Forum Administration" is the Category Manager. Even so, there is a search feature in the Wiki that would help you find the information about categories. Perhaps the search feature is not an complete substitute for fixing all these terminology issues (and maybe we need a comprehensive glossary of terms somewhere) but it's a start.

Even though some of the Wiki articles explain things in K 1.0 or K 1.5 terms, a lot of the concepts are still similar in K 1.6 even if the way that they have been implemented differs in a few cosmetic respects. These excuses notwithstanding, I agree with you that we need to update the Wiki and we're looking for people to help us in this activity.