Request: please consider clarifying the project's position on Spins

[Máirín Duffy]

On Sat, 2010-12-04 at 22:15 -0500, Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote:

> First of all, I'm not accusing you of secret hidden evil intentions.

I didn't say you were. I was accused of it pretty much every step of the
way in the new download Fedora pages and the verbal abuse has really
taken its toll on my enthusiasm and hope for finding a solution.

> As far as how we spend our time, I believe that this particular issue
> represents a serious rift in very productive parts of our community,
> which is why I believe it's worth the time to continue to discuss it.

> The Spins site is beautiful and useful.  Are we doing enough to
> promote it?  Could we do more?  Could we have an ad on the front page
> that rotates through and gives the other spins some real estate?
> 
There is a banner ad on the front page right now, I think it's set to
only show F14 for now but in between releases it usually goes through
our rotation of banner ads which includes promos for sites like Fedora
Spins and Fedora Community (another great site - for helping packagers -
that nobody knows about or uses.) We can quite easily add in banners for
specific spins if they request it (I'm guessing the place to start is
the websites team if you have an ad ready-to-go.)

There is also a permanent set of banner ads that lead directly to
spins.fedoraproject.org on ALL of the download Fedora pages
-http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora ("there's more Fedora!" in the
lower right). These have been in place since F12's release.

We *also* specifically call out individual spins and promote them with
direct links to the individual spin pages on one of the tabs on the
download options page:
http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora-options#spins

> The Spins folks believe that their work languishes in a corner.  Is
> there a way to please everybody with limited real estate?  Probably
> not.  Is there more that we can do to give individual spins more
> exposure?  Probably so.  Do the Spins people keep asking for that very
> thing?  Seems to me that they do.  

The spin owners are certainly fully-aware that the spins.fpo site exists
as I worked closely with them to come up with the design, graphics &
text for it. Each individual spin has its own Fedora-themed page with a
nice clean URL (http://spins.fedoraproject.org/spin-name ). 

Are we really confident that each spin really should be getting lots of
exposure, though? E.g., I've personally gotten egg on my face before for
promoting the Design Suite spin... apparently for F13 it did not have a
working network stack... e.g., Network Manager wasn't installed so if
you're running it you can't even get a wired connection up to download
it... 

I don't want to go all out advertising stuff that's broken. 

> Spins.fp.o is awesome.  How many people go there?  Is it unfair of
> Spins folks to ask for help in promoting that excellent page you've
> developed?

I'm happy to help promote it and am open to ideas on how we can promote
it more than we already have.

>         > Can we have that conversation without characterizing it as
>         "a
>         > choose-your-own adventure clubhouse type of affair"?
>         
>         
>         When people stop telling me that large classes of users 'have
>         no
>         business' using Linux I will stop referring to them
>         specifically as
>         clubhousers.
> 
> 
> Subtracting that word, there's still the inference that giving more
> real estate to other spins from time to time is necessarily 

I'm not sure you finished your sentence there but were you aware of the
promos we already have in place for the spins? 
>  
>         Hubristically yours
> 
> 
> -1 sarcasm.  ;)

-1 unfair accusations without apology.

~m