For the forums, it really doesn't matter what we use I guess. But we
would need to split between developers and users. Hopefully the
developers will continue to monitor the users list. But, I think trac
and subversion might be a better choice. Granted, with SF you get a lot
of visibility and your files aren't consuming your own bandwidth, it's
still something to consider.
Even without SVN integration, trac or just mediawiki would work great,
so we can build our own FAQ's etc on the fly. This preempts the need to
have someone be responsible for web content all the time. Moderators are
needed for a forum or wiki no matter what, but it can be a shared
responsiblity.
Using Yahoo Lists, or Google groups might be another idea, as the
maintenance is done by people who's job it is to ensure these
activities. Mailing lists can and will be targetted by spam, so will
forums. Why deal with all of that, when someone else will do it for you
? This allows us to work on roundcube, and not focus our energies on
customizing other software etc.
Geoffrey McCaleb 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
