Thank you for this mail. The exploration of this kind of criticism can only make the documentation better, which is what we are striving to do. So I hope you will reply to my answers.
I would stress however, that HFS is both extremely easy-to-use and feature-rich. The doc. mirrors this by just providing a little information as introduction, and putting detailed info. about the features later.
Most users just dl the software, install, and start running and using it. It really is breathtakingly easy and we don't want the doc. to imply anything else. (Almost all initial problems are related to port-forwarding, which isn't really anything to do with HFS although we do try to help with this.)
You seem to be making 5 points:
1. What is it?
I quote from the first paragraphs of the doc.
"HFS (Http File Server) is file sharing software which allows you to send and receive files. You can limit this sharing to just a few friends, or be open to the whole world. HFS is different from classic file sharing because there is no network. HFS is a web server which uses web technology to be more compatible with today's Internet.
Since it is actually a web server, your friends can download files as if they were downloading from a website using a web browser, such as Internet Explorer or Firefox. Your users don't have to install any new software."
What is difficult to understand about the above?
2.What's the flow of operation?
Surely this is answered in this section:
http://rejetto.com/wiki/index.php?title=First_time_configuration3. User interface?
What interface would you expect for a file server? "What you call the "administration interface" is the user interface (at the host end). At the user end it's the browser, and we provide lots of pictures of that.
4. "Functionality, multiple file managing...? If this is browser based then there probably is none."
I don't quite understand this. It IS browser-based. You can use download managers. There are extensive file management facilities in the server user-interface.
5. "Make someone unrelated read the website, for a few minutes, and then ask them to describe the software and it's
features."
We have tried this and the results have been very satisfactory. Everyone understands it's "some kind of server that lets you upload and download files". I admit that some of the features are not understood purely by reading, but this is common in software. Most difficulties disappear once you start using it.
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We do rely on users reading both the wiki and the FAQ.
Do you think it would be better if we moved most of the information from the FAQ to the wiki?
