14 Mar
2007
14 Mar
'07
6:04 p.m.
On Mar 14, 2007, at 5:47 PM, Esbach, Brandon wrote:
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.
I haven't used Nabble myself (except for searching) but users of it
tell me they get this. Might be good to try it out and see if it fits
the bill (I don't think it has to do 100% what forum tools like phpBB
do to be good enough for us).
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.
I knew this was coming... :) BTW did you see my answer to Catalin
about the Collaborative RSS Watch tool?
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.
For any of these solutions we would need to keep our mailing lists so
the system would have to be usable either from the forum or from the
mailing list. But I guess they all do this. I'd hate to loose the list.
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).
Cool! :)
I'd still like to know why Mailing List + Nabble (as we have it
today) doesn't fit the bill.
Thanks
-Vincent
From: Vincent Massol [mailto:vincent@massol.net]
Sent: 14 March 2007 15:55
To: xwiki-users(a)objectweb.org
Subject: Re: [xwiki-users] Do we need a forum?
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
From: Martin Barrs
[mailto:martin.barrs@visilent.com]
Sent: 14 March 2007 15:42
To: xwiki-users(a)objectweb.org
Subject: RE: [xwiki-users] Do we need a forum?
Forum - Yes.
From: Sergiu Dumitriu [mailto:sergiu.dumitriu@gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, March 13, 2007 4:36 PM
To: xwiki-users(a)objectweb.org
Subject: [xwiki-users] Do we need a forum?
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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