Re: [xwiki-users] Do we need a forum?

I haven't yet had a great reason to complain, but I can see the need emerging, as the community grows, for more narrowly targeted discussions.

I have certainly bulk-marked threads on this list, and like Catalin I believed that forums offered the best opportunity for that (our XWiki host also hosts Roller and jForum), but given that tag-and-search offers potentially better targetting, it may be the better way. One caveat on tagging, though: the effectiveness of such a scheme depends on user behavior, much more so when the community is relatively small (which XWiki's certainly is, compared to, say, del.icio.us).

The genius of it lies in the fact that each user benefits most individually by the same behavior that benefits the community as a whole, which is tagging items meaningfully. Nevertheless, such an ad-hoc mechanism can be unsatisfactory if too few people "get it". Like hashing, it walks a fine line between high collision rates (too many matches) and excessive sparseness (too few). A more robust way of combining tags ('and'/'or'/'not') would benefit tagging almost as much as with search terms, although because tags are cheap and can be liberally applied, the current "require all" works pretty well where there is a large population of liberal taggers. I do see, as the product and the community grow and mature, a growing distinction (witnessed recently) between "very advanced users/administrators/extenders" and the more casual user, and even finer distinctions within each of those groups. The difference is both qualitative and quantitative: obviously, for a successful project the growth of the population of casual users will quickly outpace and overwhelm that of advanced users, and self-help facilities will quickly be critical to success. The advanced users/admins/extenders will have more questions needing individual attention, and more likely to end up in JIRA.

One last thought: generally speaking, user fora and other self-help mechanisms do tend to grow of their own accord, so it's not necessarily a matter of major concern - if there's a big enough perceived need, someone will host it, whether anyone else wants them to or not, and the quality of the idea and the implementation will tend to attract those whose benefit it best serves.

Under that heading, I intend to investigate Nabble; it does sound interesting; sort of like subscribing to the mailing list with a shared GMail account, if I understand it correctly, no...?

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