On 03/08/2011 07:45 AM, Vincent Massol wrote:
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: http://markmail.org/thread/gbdnyb7jbh4ha5ja -- Sergiu Dumitriu http://purl.org/net/sergiu/