Ben Burdette wrote:
I'd have to say that for the casual or occasional user, there are
significant advantages to a web forum. For me, monitoring an active
email list like openmoko in my email client is a fairly sizable
undertaking - there are many emails per day to look through. I take
time several times a day to look through these, or just mark the
folder 'read'. If I were only want to look at the forum once every
few weeks, then subscribing to the list would be overkill. On the
other hand, in order to participate in the list you need to
subscribe. So web-search only users are in effect barred from posting.
Even if our casual users wanted 70-80 emails a day for something they
only use once in a while, its still a hassle to set up if you don't
know about email filtering and etc. Lots of people don't.
Compare this to the effort needed to visit slashdot. You register
once, and you never need to worry about it again. Visit every day or
every 6 months, doesn't matter.
The other aspect is that you are putting your real email address out
there on the internet for lots of people to look at. This means its
an excellent place for spammers to harvest email accounts. With a
forum your personal data is more anonymous. Plus there is potential
for other social networking style things like user profiles - what
users are working on, etc.
You are exactly correct. Quite frankly I am completely, totally,
overwhelmingly baffled at the resistance to the forums. Quite a few
people have expressed their dislikes of mailing lists and how they were
*very* reluctant (like myself) to join. Although I consider my self a
developer and on somewhat on top of technical stuff, I still would
prefer a web forum. I think that *most* non-technical people would also
be more comfortable with a forum. I'm really not sure what the motive
for NOT wanting a forum is, other than people being set in their ways
and unwilling to accommodate people less technically proficient as they are.
Now, the title of this thread is "OK, the forum is coming.." because I
thought that someone was going to set one up on at least until
FIC/OpenMoko created an official one. I think phpBB is the general
consensus. I would do it myself, but my servers are located at my house
on a cable modem. I have decent uptime, but it isn't as stable as a box
in a noc. I don't mind running it, but would prefer a more stable
environment. That said, just let me know if you want me to go ahead and
set it up. FYI, you can easily import/export to a different instance if
we do want/need to change its location.
-Jonathon
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