8 Mar
2011
8 Mar
'11
4:23 p.m.
On 03/08/2011 03:30 PM, Vincent Massol wrote:
On Mar 8, 2011, at 3:04 PM, Sergiu Dumitriu wrote:
The users list is indeed a bit too intrusive for users. When someone has
a problem and wants to get help, they have to subscribe to the mailing
list, post their question, then be spammed by other people's problems
until they get an answer. A forum would be nicer for this kind of
problem, you can watch only the topic you're interested in.
On the other hand it's difficult for devs, since a forum-only solution
means having to watch the forum all day long. It's pull instead of push,
and the pull solution works well for users that only care for their
problem, but devs don't react unless they're pushed.
That's why a dual view of the messages is good, it lets users mind their
problems, while pushing questions to devs.
Nabble is good as a forum-over-mail solution. I'd be OK to find a
reverse solution, a good forum that has a very good email integration.
I'm not OK with devs investigating this, so if the community can
thoroughly investigate what can be used, we can implement it.
Or, if users think that Nabble is enough, but it only lacks visibility,
we can try to increase it's visibility (quick link to it, a more
prominent display on the mailing list page, a link from the Support
page...).
--
Sergiu Dumitriu
http://purl.org/net/sergiu/
On 03/08/2011 07:45 AM, Vincent Massol wrote:
Right I had forgotten about this discussion :)
I do remember another one though (earlier than the one you pointed) where I was the one
wanting a forum as a way to get more participation.
What I'd really like to have that we don't currently have is a way to more
visibly see who's participating more and thus encourage participation. A lot of forum
do this by giving points to people who answer questions, then they get a title and a badge
based on these points. Then you can list the top contributors.
That said, thanks to markmail, I think our mailing lists have become a lot more browsable
than before and we even get statistics:
http://xwiki.markmail.org/search/?q=
At some point in the past I looked at jive because it has this point system and it had
the feature to be integrated on top of a mailing list. But since it disappeared I
haven't found any other good option that would allow us to keep the list too.
Now we have a real open question as to whether we want to keep our list AND create a
getstatisfaction project for XWiki too (getsatisfaction or another similar tool). So far
we've resisted doing this because it means scattering our support and thus reducing
the support quality level (we cannot monitor several places easily). There are some guys
who post and ask questions about xwiki on developez.com for example (see
http://tinyurl.com/4ftdyly) but since we don't answer there I believe people either
think xwiki is not well supported or they find their way to the official support
location.
One one hand I'd love to use a tool such as getsatisfaction, OTOH I don't know
how we can manage properly both our lists + getsatisfaction.
One solution would be to remove the user list and only keep the devs list and move users
to getsatisfaction but I'm not sure how good or bad that would be.
Anyone having any thoughts on this? Hi Andreas,
On Mar 7, 2011, at 11:13 PM, Andreas Hahn wrote:
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 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