Fair point indeed,
I'll agree first up that anything relevant on the maillists
should go onto the xwiki.org site - totally valid.
Being on sevreal different forums (from technical to
consumer), and different maillists, I think it's true that there is no one
solution. A really good user group tool is one that is workable via forum
and email (such as google groups), in this way answers come to you, but you can
also easily research problems (and answer older problems too). I've had to
dig a few times through the maillist and usually end up re-emailing the list -
as much as 90% of the time; purely as it's not an easily searchable
interface. Forums are designed to be easily searchable (the ones I've used
anyway, phpBB being the most flexible); and are also designed with the
"sticky/announcement" features built in - so important/often-asked topics can be
answered quickly, without re-posting.
Know what would really rock? Creating a class and
relevant documents to mimic a forum within the xwiki.org site; linked into the
email lists (so that "topics" or master documents are automatically
created). XWiki already has a tagging interface (haven't used it much yet
though myself), and it would be quite a nice improvement over the older - dated
- FAQ class example.
Perhaps what would help is to setup the proposed system for
review; and we can see how that works.
To be perfectly honest, if folks are
really behind a forum, as to the cost of setting up forums/etc.. there are a lot
of free hosting solutions that offer phpBB, and variants of it (including phpBB
themselves); so the cost of it is not too prohibitive, especially if it's run by
users.
And yeah, if folks are happy to buy into the idea; I'll set
it up and help anyone else interested in assisting with maintaining
it (ensuring xwiki devs have logon details to the admin account naturally,
just in case).
On Mar 14, 2007, at 4:45 PM, Esbach, Brandon wrote:
Actually, I'd be inclined to say the pro's far exceed the
cons on a forum...
Actually, I'd be inclined to say that cons far exceed the pros on a forum
:-)
What this means is that you need to answer to the points I've raised
against a forum. You can't just say you'd like one. In my post I've answered
Sergiu's points and proposed an alternative solution. I'm curious to know why
you think the proposed solution is not good enough.
In the case we agree to have a forum, does this mean you're willing to set
it up, administer it and pay for the cost of the hardware? :)
Thanks
-Vincent
Forum - Yes.
Hi,
We're currently using mailing lists and IRC (and
person2person chats) for answering user questions. But:
- IRC has no
history (yet; when's that bot coming online?)
- mailing lists are not that
easy to browse and search.
Should we make a forum for
users?
Pro
- One place where users can find information, organized
by topics
- Users are used to posting on forums, and we might get a larger
community
Con
- Soon it will get too crowded, and (some) developers
won't have the time to answer all the emails; we need a strong community, and
advanced users knowing the code, and for this we need documentation
As a developer, I'd stick to mailing lists.
As a user, I'd
say forum.
What's your opinion?
--
http://purl.org/net/sergiu
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