dojo-interest mailing list thoughts

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Warning, this is a rare long post by me.

I've been skimming through the dojo-interest mailing list.  As one of
the co-founders of Dojo, I rarely get to read through the interest list
because the volume is too high, and because we have a great community
here that helps out by giving back time.  And really every e-mail read
and responded to is one less bug fixed by every committer to Dojo.

When we first set out to do Dojo, we were tired of reinventing the wheel
when it came to writing core functionality that we all needed from the
browser in general, and JavaScript in particular.

The tone of some of the emails recently and periodically has been
something along the lines of: "I can't Dojo to work, you have ruined my
life, unless you drop everything now and help me fix my issue."

We share and understand your frustration, after all, we are all
developers that work hard on our projects and get stressed out when the
pressure builds from something not working the way you would want and
expect.

Along the same lines, we're all beyond busy, and Dojo isn't a project
we're selling to you as a foundation (although many of us are paid to
work on Dojo part or full-time and/or pay others to work on Dojo, myself
and Alex included).

As an organization, we're doing whatever we can to improve
documentation, on both the API level and the book level, as Alex
outlined in his recent emails.

We are also re-working the web site to hopefully make it easier to find
the large amount of difficult to find information that is out there
about Dojo.  We know it is a challenge right now, and we're working to
make that better as we make the toolkit better.

We've also had the great assistance of Karl in pointing people in the
right direction, but also calling them out when they ask a question
without using a search engine on the error message they have to see if
an answer is out there already.

It is my hope that when you have a problem with Dojo, you will provide
as much detail about the problem you are having as possible, including
if possible and when appropriate good testcases, error messages, and
enough information about what is not working to show that you've at
least taken the steps necessary to try to help yourself.  This of course
assumes that before you post a question to the mailing list, you have
searched the book, the API documentation, the FAQs, the mailing list,
and your search engine of choice.  Not doing so reduced the amount of
time spent on code, document, and providing new support to the
community.  I know that there is nothing I personally like doing less
than repeating myself.  Along the same lines, reposting the same message
before people have had time to address your issue is even more
frustrating, and disrespectful of the time of the community that chooses
to volunteer time to support this list.

Comparably, when responding to someone with a problem about Dojo, I
would hope that the community won't reply just to reply, but that the
responses will be thoughtful and actually answer the question being
asked if the original poster is being reasonable.  Probably the only
thing more frustrating than not getting your question answered is to
have your time wasted with answers that are incorrect and/or not based
on actually knowing if something is correct.  The general and rather
simple rule I use when responding to a question is, would this be an
answer that would actually solve the problem if I was the one posing the
question.

The list is only as good as the quality of the messages.  Please
remember this when you post your next message or response.

- -Dylan
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