Re: [Supertuxkart-devel] STK forum?

[Joerg H. <jo...@lu...>]

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Hi all,

just my 2 cents: I agree with Conso that a forum might not be too good
an idea. I just noticed that we (esp. Coz) wasted quite a bit of time
with keeping the wiki clean (protecting pages, ...). We are currently
too small a set of developers to afford this (and if we wouldn't answer
postings, the forum is kind of useless).

One 'in between' solution for people who are 'afraid' of posting to a
news group: we could create a new email address (as in userid on
sourceforge, like supertuxkart-feedback or so), put this address online,
and we would then decide what to do with the emails. Obviously, that's
some additional overhead as well (not to mention spam risk, so we might
need a feedback input page to protect the email address, ...).

Or we could have an inofficial forum (like the German forum). As long as
some admins keep the forum clean, and point interesting discussions out
to us that might work.

*shrug* Not sure if any of this is actually a good idea, I am happy the
way it is now - we have enough to do, enough plans and ideas to keep us
going for a while I guess :)

[...]
> Sorry for replying to this old message, but we should really think about 
> this, if there is such a big interest for it.
> What we shouldn't do, is mixing the wiki and the forum, letting users 
> modify both. That would be very inconvenient.
I agree, letting everybody modifying the wiki messed up the wiki.

[...]
> That shouldn't be a problem with most forum softwares available.
> A forum would bring a need of feedback by the developers, there has to 
> be a decission, where the actual dicussion takes place, before it will 
> be spread over the email-list and the forum.
My preferences would be to have discussions on the email list (or if the
traffic gets too high, a new stk-user list). The archives are online and
searchable, people can have their own version in their favorite mailer,
and it causes less overhead for us. Esp. some more passive readers might
get more involved this way, too.

[...]

>>> 3: More users would maybe report bugs, as even I don´t know where the bug
>>> tracker is.
>> Bugs can be sent anywhere, really. However, since the developers are
>> the ones who use the bug tracker more often, it helps to keep track of
>> the bugs that we have spotted and know about; I like it that way at
>> the moment.
I think this is an important point: we currently do not have a link to
the sourceforge page on the homepage anymore (partly my fault iirc,
since I suggested to make the menu smaller). This means that it is
currently pretty hard to find where/how to submit bugs. We should have
at least a link to the stk sourceforge development pages, and perhaps
(somewhere in user doc) a direct link to the bug page.


[...]
>> I have two main reasons not to implement a forum now, I would solve
>> the others if these two weren't in the way:
>>
>> First, the time to set it up. Lately, I have worked on the website, on
>> the widget manager, on administration... no user visible change in the
>> game, and I don't want too get into yet another task that won't give
>> direct user visible improvements.
I totally agree. Coz is the only one (afaik) who has some experience
with the track modelling in bullet, AI, and widgets, and there are a few
outstanding bugs :)

>> Second, having another thing to manage, thus something that uses more
>> time and effort. We eliminated sourceforge forums and other things to
>> have less things where users could contact us; I noticed that
>> sometimes, at least me, would forget about checking them or delay a
>> lot. It might not seem like so, but just reading each e-mail from the
>> list and thinking what I should reply (and more often than not make
>> development decisions) takes a lot of time, and it's not something
>> that I can put off to continue in 3 days, like coding.
Again, I agree - the approach of a 'push' (messages are pushed into our
inbox) as compared to us having to pull the bits and pieces from several
forums is significant.


Cheers,
  Joerg

- --
- ----------------------------------------------------------------
Joerg Henrichs
Luding Administration
e-mail: jo...@lu...
URL:    http://luding.org

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