Re: Maybe the time has come for forums

[Bradley Holt]

Personally I like the way Google Groups is set up. You can use it as a forum or a mailing list or both if you'd like. Each user can decide how they want to use it. To do something similar you would simply need to archive all the posts from this mailing list. The down side is that you wouldn't have your posts organized into subjects (unless you had a group for each subject which probably isn't a great idea). However, I have not seen any forum software that I actually like (other than Google Groups) and I've tried many of them. Whatever you pick, please keep it simple. I hate forums that try to give you every possible feature like avatars, etc.

On 10/13/05, Geoffrey McCaleb <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

Ok guys, don't kill me.

I know this topic has been beaten to death, even today, but I think we all need to appreciate that the slashdot affect has changed things a bit.

I know the developers are not in favor of it, but there are two things to consider:

1. There are no searchable archives. As I said last week, we will eventually get 20 users asking the same questions with no chance for shared knowledge. As much as you may like mailing lists....this will annoy you.
2. Slashdot, in my opinion, has effectively put us on the map. While a lot of that is good, another angle is not so good.

Ergo, the volume of mails on this list may in fact, increase...dramatically. For the community, that's great. But, I don't know about you guys, a mailing list is great if I'm getting 10-15 mails a day thats fairly topical and of interest.

How many mails a day are we getting now? 20? 30? How about when a trade mag like The Register writes a story? Or Wired? Or Jeffrey Veen? Once we get on the blog rolls, the community will grow quite rapidly.

I know that we as a group, discussed this last week. But I would urge everyone to consider what an increase in exposure will do. We really need forums, I'm sorry but wiki's are great for documentation, but crap for general support. Users, like asking questions. I know I do.

I think we need forums, but on the developers terms. ie something in an environment the team supports/controls. Something that is secure, and something that is easy to maintain. Someone made some alternate suggestions to phpbb that deserves a look. One of them was called vanilla ( http://getvanilla.com) which looks promissing.

Any thoughts?

Geoffrey

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Bradley Holt < [EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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