David, Dave, Geoff, Benny, 

An answers.ros.org cleanup party on the 19th seems like a good idea. Lets plan to have a discussion at ROSCon about how to make it fun. We've did this occasionally in the past usually in person with some libations. 

There's definitely a level of user training to be done. And anyone who's on the site, please give helpful guiding comments and link to the faq and support guidelines when necessary. We do have the link quite prominently, but that doesn't mean people read them. A reminder is quite valuable. 

I've started looking at how we can make closing some of the old/off topic issues easier.  I've opened a ticket for adding new closure rules: https://github.com/ros-infrastructure/answers.ros.org/issues/102  If there are other ways that we can make closing out old questions easier please let us know. 

Tully


On Thu, Sep 4, 2014 at 10:20 PM, Benjamin Reiner <reineben@hs-weingarten.de> wrote:
Maybe we should add a big fat link to the ROS answers FAQ and to http://wiki.ros.org/Support at the top of the ROS answers page. I can imagine that many questions stay unanswered because they are bad written.

Also, often new users comment on their own questions with the answer-function and not with the comment-function.
Then the problem is that not much users look at questions that already have 2 or more answers and in the end the question stays unanswered.

Benny


Am 2014-09-05 5:11, schrieb Geoffrey Biggs:
Although the answers site has a tags system, perhaps we can put it to
work when a user posts a question? The site could do some processing
on the tags and, when it finds a particular tag, display a message to
the user and ask if they really want to post the question. For
example, if the user specifies the "moveit" tag, a message can be
displayed explaining where the primary source of MoveIt! help is, and
asking if the user still wants to post the question to answers.ros.org
 [1].

Geoff

On 5 September 2014 12:00, Dave Coleman <davetcoleman@gmail.com>
wrote:

Instead of hijacking Tully's 2014 Metrics Report thread I've renamed
this thread to comment on David's question :-)

This is just one aspect of the issue, but I see on answers.ros.org
 [1] there are a lot of questions about MoveIt!, many of which are
unanswered. Although MoveIt! is a major component of ROS, there is
a schism as to where questions are answered. MoveIt!'s main
 discussion area is the user mailing list [2], secondary is Github
issues, but also there are the answers.ros.org [1] questions.
Instructions for how to get MoveIt! support are here [3], but I
understand why some users are confused. 

I imagine there are similar divisions with projects like PCL and
Gazebo. Perhaps we should do something to help users understand the
scope of these various avenues of discussion.

dave coleman

On Thu, Sep 4, 2014 at 3:19 PM, David Lu!! <davidlu@wustl.edu>
wrote:

Thanks for putting together the report, Tully. 

One additional metric that has gone up over the past four years is
 the percentage of questions on answers.ros.org [1] that have gone
unanswered. I've attached a graph with the numbers from the past
reports. We've steadily grown from 13% in 2011 to 32% now.  

I'd be interested in seeing additional numbers on what kinds of
questions get answered or not. Do power users get more of their
questions answered? Are certain tags more answered? (I swear I'll
get to your navigation questions soon). 

There's the bigger question of what we as a community can do to get
more questions marked as resolved. The answer is most likely
somewhere between answering more questions and making sure questions
are marked as resolved (if they are). Maybe September 19th is
"Answer ROS Questions Like A Pirate Day". 

-David

P.S. For those who have never heard of

it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Talk_Like_a_Pirate_Day
[4]
P.P.S. I realize the irony of complaining about questions not being
answered by asking additional questions. 

On Thu, Sep 4, 2014 at 3:29 PM, Tully Foote
<tfoote@osrfoundation.org> wrote:

Hi Everyone, 

The 2014 edition of the ROS Metrics Report is now posted at:
http://download.ros.org/downloads/metrics/metrics-report-2014-07.pdf
 [5]

This is the 4th version of the ROS Metrics report. All are versions
 are available at: http://wiki.ros.org/Metrics [6] 

The ROS community has grown in almost every metric. The one
exception is that the number of wiki pages has dropped. This is due
to a concerted cleanup effort earlier this year which removed a lot
of empty pages with little to no content. 

The other metric which warrants note is the large growth in the
number of unique IPs per month, up to 49,153 from last years
sampling of 11,078.  And the total downloads of packages more than
doubled to 3,570,374 downloads. 

And all of these numbers do not count the any statistics for mirrors
either private or public. [1] 

If you have a moment we recommend you take a look. There are many
interesting statistics such as ROS users by country and the top 40
most downloaded packages. 

Related to this look for more information on the ROS ecosystem from
William Curran's talk next week at ROSCon 2014.  [2] 

Tully

 [1] http://wiki.ros.org/Mirrors [7]
[2] http://roscon.ros.org/2014/program/ [8]
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Links:
------
[1] http://answers.ros.org
[2] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/moveit-users/join
[3] http://moveit.ros.org/support/
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Talk_Like_a_Pirate_Day
[5] http://download.ros.org/downloads/metrics/metrics-report-2014-07.pdf
[6] http://wiki.ros.org/Metrics
[7] http://wiki.ros.org/Mirrors
[8] http://roscon.ros.org/2014/program/
[9] http://lists.ros.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-users

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