Good technical support is available from e-mail discussion lists, which are groups of people discussing specific topics through e-mail. E-mail lists are available for pretty much any subject you can think of: Powerball, ancient philosophy, cooking, the Beatles, Scottish terriers, politics, and so on. The list manager maintains a distribution list of e-mail addresses for anyone who wants to join the discussion. When you send a message to the discussion list, your message is sent to the entire list so that everyone can see it. Thus, the discussion is a group effort, and anyone can respond to any message that interests him or her. E-mail discussion lists are supported by various sponsors. Any individual or organization can run a list. Most software vendors run one or more lists devoted to their software. Universities run many lists for educational subjects. In addition, some Web sites manage discussion lists, such as Yahoo! Groups and Topica. Users can create a new list or join an existing list through the Web application.
Software-related e-mail lists are a treasure trove of technical support. Anywhere from a hundred to several thousand users of the software subscribe to the list. Often the developers, programmers, and technical support staff for the software vendor are on the list. You are unlikely to be the first person to ever experience your problem. Whatever your question or problem, someone on the list probably knows the answer or the solution. When you post a question to an e-mail list, the answer usually appears in your inbox within minutes. In addition, most lists maintain an archive of previous discussions so that you can search for answers. When you’re new to any software, you can find out a great deal simply by joining the discussion list and reading the messages for a few days. PHP and MySQL have e-mail discussion lists. Actually, each has several discussion lists for special topics, such as databases and PHP. You can find the names of the mailing lists and instructions for joining them on the PHP and MySQL Web sites.
Software-related e-mail lists are a treasure trove of technical support. Anywhere from a hundred to several thousand users of the software subscribe to the list. Often the developers, programmers, and technical support staff for the software vendor are on the list. You are unlikely to be the first person to ever experience your problem. Whatever your question or problem, someone on the list probably knows the answer or the solution. When you post a question to an e-mail list, the answer usually appears in your inbox within minutes. In addition, most lists maintain an archive of previous discussions so that you can search for answers. When you’re new to any software, you can find out a great deal simply by joining the discussion list and reading the messages for a few days. PHP and MySQL have e-mail discussion lists. Actually, each has several discussion lists for special topics, such as databases and PHP. You can find the names of the mailing lists and instructions for joining them on the PHP and MySQL Web sites.
No comments:
Post a Comment