Hi Andreas,
On Mar 7, 2011, at 11:13 PM, Andreas Hahn wrote:
Hi everyone,
I'd like to make the proposal to drop the existing mailing lists in
favor of a forum (bulletin board) software.
The objective is to promote the XWiki community discussions to a broader
audience.
1) A forum serves like an advertising window as anyone can read the
contributions without subscription.
You don't need any subscription to read
mailing lists.
See
http://xwiki.markmail.org/
2) Anyone can judge the activity by reading the
view count.
Same here:
http://xwiki.markmail.org/
3) New users can get in touch with the community
without being urged to
subscribe to a mailing list.
How? Even with forums you need to subscribe.
4) Many people consider mailing lists as spam and
prefer not to subscribe
5) Contributions have a longer visibility and older entries will get
responses
6) Communication gets more efficient as the same topics won't get
repeatedly discussed
7) To my experience forums get much better indexed by google as mail
collectors like Nabble , Markmail, e.t.c.
8) Forums encourage user to user discussions and you will see new users
taking an active role
9) There should be at least one additional category IMHO: administrators
10) A forum is more pleasure to read once a topic split into many threads
11) A forum is beneficial when expecting increasing support requirements
- some real large scale forums were run by just a few moderators
12) More people will see what a teriffic job the XWiki team does.
Here's my +1
I have some good news for you: we already have a forum! :)
See
http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Community/MailingLists
And more specifically:
http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Community/Forum
Now if this forum doesn't fit your needs could you explain what requirements
you'd have for a forum and which solution you'd pick?
I personally liked jive forums but it doesn't exist anymore (it's folded into a
full collaboration suite now).
Thanks
-Vincent
This was thoroughly discussed four years ago, and the conclusion was
against installing a specific forum, and stick with Nabble as a
forum-like view of the mailing list activity: