Comment 20 for bug 31775

On Tue, 2006-03-07 at 17:18 +0000, Matt Zimmerman wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 07, 2006 at 03:48:07PM -0000, Matthew East wrote:

> > On the "Community" point you make, that's fine by me.
> >
> > However "Technical" does not go anywhere towards establishing that that
> > service is a paid for one. Both free and commercial support can be
> > "technical". So, something like:
>
> I disagree; there is a strong connotation in English that "technical
> support" is a helpdesk type service, in contrast to the kind of help that
> one can get by asking family, friends, neighbors, etc. (which is what we
> mean by the "community" option)

I'm not really convinced by this, although of course the decision will
be up to you. I agree that "community" has a different feel to
professional support, but I don't believe the word "technical"
represents the difference. Indeed, the forums regard their help as of a
"technical/helpdesk" nature. What we are really getting at is the
difference between "community" and "professional". "Technical" doesn't
go near that, at least in my understanding of how the word is generally
used.

> There are many important distinctions between "community" support (asking
> other users for help) and "commercial" support (technical support / helpdesk
> services), beyond the question of money. For this reason, I think they
> should be named more distinctly.

I completely agree: indeed that is why I suggested title based on "Free
Support" and "Commercial Support". You are right that it isn't always
simply a question of money (subject to the caveat that there is probably
nothing to stop a community member asking to be added to the
marketplace, and charging for support), but I think those simple titles,
expanded upon by tooltips along the lines of those you suggested, would
work really well.

> > On the local language point, you're right: if the URIs can be localised,
> > then that is no problem. But if they can't, a link to an English webpage
> > with a link at the bottom to another page which has various languages on
> > it is nowhere near as good as a link to the latter page straight away.
> > In the first case, the user who doesn't speak any English has no change
> > of finding the right page.
>
> If the browser language preferences are not sufficient, then localizing the
> URLs is straightforward with a helper program. The user has already told
> Ubuntu the language in which they prefer to be addressed, and we should
> respect that preference without asking again.

Ok, if localizing the URLs is possible, we could work with Seb to make a
page for each localisation on the website.

Matt
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