Re: Resistance to allowing anonymous web access to online help?

[Robert Lauriston <robert -at- lauriston -dot- com>]

For the last ten years, I've been documenting complex client-server
enterprise applications. The developers and system administrators who
use them know that the only source of information is the docs and
support.

If a customer asked for technical information about these products on
a public forum such as StackOverflow, they'd be violating the terms of
their software license. Anyone who knows the answer is also under NDA.

For two of the products I've documented, there is literally not a
single mention on stackexchange.com or stackoverflow.com. The others,
there's one mention each, in replies to people looking for a tool for
a specific task.

On Sun, Jun 19, 2016 at 11:41 AM,  <mbaker -at- analecta -dot- com> wrote:
> ... If you
> don't put the docs on the web, your customers are more likely to go to Stack
> Overflow for answers. Customers don't read the manual. They read the page
> they find when they search. The first place they search is Google. If the
> first page Google turns up is StackOverflow, that is the page they will
> read. That trains them that the place to get answers is stack overflow, so
> that is where they go when they have a question. ...
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