From: Arnout E. <ros...@bz...> - 2008-02-26 22:31:39
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On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 12:58:11PM +0000, Chris Cannam wrote: > How's the general feeling towards web-based forums these days? Depends: if I'm just 'passing by', I like a forum and don't want to bother subscribing to some mailinglist. If I have some sort of relationship with a project, otoh, I don't want to keep checking the forum, and instead prefer to have the discussion delivered to my mailbox. Conceptually, I think there should be no difference between searching though a forum or though a mail archive. There should be no difference between posting on a forum and sending mail to a mail archive. > Is it necessary, given the forum-style interfaces to the list that > already exist (such as Nabble)? These, at least in my opinion, tend to be horrible, because they rely on clumsy back-and-forth gatewaying between otherwise separate worlds. The proper design, imho, would be to have one repository of messages, and really treat posting to the forum the same as posting to the maillist. If you find a package that does this, let me know - it's been a while since I've been searching. All of this, however, is of course just my theoretical ranting and doesn't answer your questions in practice :). > Is it a bad idea to effectively duplicate user support across the > mailing list and forum? > Would it double the workload for the already overstretched people who > answer many of the questions (hi Michael!) or could it improve the > situation by increasing the base of people likely to respond? It's hard to tell - I'm not sure either way. If we try this, I think the forum should at least support RSS or mail notifications, so it's possible to track forum activity without actually manually logging in frequently. Arnout |