Re: [Springframework-developer] I hate the forum

[Colin S. <col...@ex...>]

I actually find the sum total significantly more producting than the old 
combo of bad SF forums and the user mailing list. At the top level, I 
can see at a glance which forums have unread topics, and within a forum 
see the actual unread topics.  The "posts since last login" seems to 
work fine for me. I can also with one click, see unanswered posts. Now 
my perspective is not that of someone who is just trying to read every 
post, but rather as someone has to try to answer a good number of posts, 
and help verify that the others get answered). When I consider that 
before this had to be done for the crappy old forums _and_ the mailing 
list, there's just no question that in terms of my abilities to help 
answer questions, we're in a better place now. My perception is also 
that somebody coming in who needs to just find an answer to a question, 
is going to have an easier time, in terms of search, in terms of joining 
(vs. a mailing list), and in terms of being notified when there's an 
answer to his question. I agree that somebody who just wants to see 
every single post coming by probably has a harder time, but that's 
probably not the primary role of the _support_ venue...

There is a digest mod available for phpBB, which can mail out digests of 
all the posts on a daily or weekly basis. The main issues are that it is 
third party, so it has to be basically hand merged into all the 
templates available on the site (we have 6-7 templates offered). Aside 
from the fairly significant work to get it in in the first palce, it's 
fragile if the template or phpBB have to be updated, or other mods have 
to go in. The next version of phpBB (2.2 compared to our present 2.0x) 
will allow subscribing to get all new posts as individual emails, for 
each forum. Unfortunately while they are in some sort of very long beta, 
there's no defined time for when this will be stable. We could also just 
pay $160 or so and move to vBulletin, which while commercial, is pretty 
cheap, and has enhanced threading and email functionality built-in...

Colin

James Cook wrote:

>A little too dramatic? :)
>
>Actually, I think there was talk about sending an email to registered users
>wasn't there? This would be a big help staying up on the news. 
>
>I love (equally dramatic) the searching esp. if we can get SF archives
>imported and the massive usability improvement over SF. But, without an
>email or digest, I can't seem to stay up with the posts. 
>
>My interests in Spring span most of the categories, so that's lots of
>clicking around. And the "posts since last login" doesn't work well at all.
>How are the developers coping? 
>  
>