Hi All,

I am in the process of creating a comprehensive support FAQ that can be used free by all web-hosts; there are many silly mistakes that non-technical users like me repeatedly do and I feel a good FAQ can eliminate atleast 50% of your support costs...

[For example , I uploaded index.htm into public_html instead of index.html and tried logging into webmail ~neomail~ with username instead of username@mydomain.com; and I had to write to my host to solve these]

I also find that most hosts do not have the time to update their FAQ. We can solve this once and for all now...

If you can all contribute your frequent Q & A 's I will add them to my FAQ and will also update it atleast once a week... I can ensure that it is very well written and easily understood by someone who does not know what is reverse DNS or httpd ! :)

We can all use this freely, and if 50 hosts pitch in 2-3 issues a week, it can really become a solid knowledge DB.

Interested parties may please mail faq@quillmagic.com... I only have 25MB storage so please send only plain text files

Cheers & have a good day

GB

How will this work? Maybe like a txt file we can just set up an include code snippet on the FAQ site with. Or would you require a link to the site....or is that the whole idea? ;)

What will be the format of the FAQ database?

I suggest using XML, since its a portable format, and people can use XSL to transform it to whatever they want.

Here is a sample,

<faq-entry guid="5368"> - the guid is a "globally unique identifier" for faqs

<question>
How to register domain?
</question>

<answer>
Go to <param name="my registrator"/> and register.

(note: the param tag is used to make variable data, for example, every host has a different sendmail path.
</answer>

<references>

<link url="http://www.internic.org/"/>

<faq-link guid="1345"/> - links to another faq entry

<references>

</faq-entry>

By the way, if you do use my format, I would appreciate a notice :)

Peter

Or use MySQL. That's what we do. Entirely driven by MySQL, the only thing php does it display the information.

How would this work, since hosts do not use the same config. For example, our servers do not have a public_html directory - we have a data directory for Linux and a www directory for Windows.

--Tina

Tina is right.
Don't forget that not every host uses the same control panel, same OS, same configuration, same mail software,...

Originally posted by Walter
Tina is right.
Don't forget that not every host uses the same mail software,...

What? You mean there are people out there who aren't using qmail? :eek2:

I seem to have bitten more than I can chew!

What I mean is, we can create a knowledge database and try to cover as many configurations as members can contribute to... and may be each host can select what is applicable to him/her...

All I am saying is , I am willing to work on the wordsmithing and formatting of it from a general user perspective [and no I don't want it to load from my site or anything... if you give me a link back I would appreciate it but that too is not my agenda here]...

Maybe we can have one for Cpanel [which a fair lot of hosts out there are using] and one for Win2K or something...

The bulk of the work in getting an FAQ up is writing the Q&A.. I can develop & maintain the .txt file and anybody can take it from me for free; formatting it as XML or putting in mySQL is for you techies to look after...

This is only an idea, since most people seem to be answering trivial questions most times

Cheers
GB

This is just a suggestion, but what if you had a system, where you had a seperate FAQ DataBase for each type of control panel. I mean, you could do something like have the hosting company put on their site a link to the correct pages.

Suggested FAQ's:
Cpanel
Plesk
Cobalt
and more

Then, you could have it like this: www.whatever.com/cpanel or plesk

Or, you could even do something like www.whatever.com/faq.cgi?plesk

There are alot of different things that could go into affect with this FAQ.

Just some suggestions.

Jim

How about just starting a web hosting category at http://www.faqts.com/ ?

All these ideas are wonderful but no one seems to have sent any issues and resolutions!

I will wait for a week and then maybe do something else!! ~L~

Cheers
GB