Besides writing code, there are other ways to participate in an open source project. After all, the software is just a component of a final product. We can find support and documentation, which in most cases make the real difference between a good and a bad product from the user's perspective.
Software quality is described by a combination of several factors: functional and non-functional features, internal and external qualities, and last but not least, documentation.
By "documentation", I personally mean a complex and huge world made up of different types of information for different types of target audience:
- Technical internal documentation: Strictly needed by active developers to inform about the structure or the implementation of the system.
- Technical external documentation: Crucial for open source projects representing frameworks, things that can be extended. This is sometimes called the developer guide. This kind of information documents the public API and the extension points that let developers integrate the product with their applications.
- User documentation: This enables end users to understand the usage and power of a given system. It is sometimes called a user guide and is the primary source of information for an end user.
Solr has two main places where documentation can be found:
- The reference guide, available online at https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/solr/About+This+Guide, or in PDF format
- The Solr community Wiki, at https://wiki.apache.org/solr
The first is a guide constituting the official reference documentation. It is created and maintained by Solr committers. On the other hand, the Wiki is a public and collaborative tool. Anyone can potentially edit its content by creating an account and then requesting write grants from the Solr team. For detailed instructions refer to http://wiki.apache.org/solr/#How_to_edit_this_Wiki.
A list moderator is a kind of supervisor for a given mailing list and a user with elevated privileges. He can get a list of all subscribers and manually subscribe or unsubscribe a given user.
He checks emails sent to the list from addresses that are not subscribed in order to improve spam filter rules. He also helps users who face issues related with lists (for example, subscription and un-subscription).