Hy, Drew! Sorry for the delay, I was not on town yesterday and there was a lot to read today ;) On one hand, I see resource splitting (and a new forum imply that resources will split: you cannot be on all places at the same time) as a problem, because it is a synonym of duplicated efforts. But on the other hand the splitting on the OOo forums came because there was no "official" support channel outside mailing lists and it was not possible to agree with a view on how to manage the forum with Ed. And (third hand?) a lot of people do not like mailing lists: they are chaotic, difficult to search with lots of duplicated threads.(1) And no, I don't think nabble solve those problems: nabble make mailing lists handling a bit easier, adding the possibility of cross-referencing, but it is far from being a real forum. For now we are OK with the existing forums, but on the long run it seems LibO will diverge from OOo quite a lot. Even if some of us could be crazy enough to have several packages running on parallel (LibO, OOo, development versions...) and be aware of the growing differences, soon or later the people helping on the forums will be hit by real life and will need to do a choice sticking with one solution: under that situation will not be realistic to have only one structure for all the variants. When this time arrive and LibO will be different enough from OOo, maybe it will be too late to start a LibO own solution, as it was a bit late when the OOo community forums started. To grow healthy, LibO needs to communicate with their users on all possible channels and a user forum is one of the most important ones. But this communication must be between the project and its users, not between the users and some third party group. But if an official forum starts, I think LibO must be, first of all, honest with itself and with the people interested and recognize its inheritance: a section of it should be devoted to link to existing resources where there are lots of user guides and good threads available that are still valid. Only when the differences grow enough, those links should be replaced by local content. Just my 2¢
Ricardo (1) Before someone start arguing that forums have the same problems (I read that many times from people who prefer mailing lists), that's not true: maybe some moderators could have that problem, but never the forums by itself when considered as a tool. The OOo community forums are a really good example: they are very clean and well organized because moderators move, merge, split, cross reference and even remove threads all the time. And on a phpBB forum that "house cleaning" is really easy to perform: you only need dedicated people and we have lots of dedicated people ;) 2011/1/10 drew <[email protected]>: > Howdy Ricardo, > > May I just ask first, before responding to others. You where part of the > discussion on the user services forum, I think, at least I am pretty > sure you would have read the last discussion in the admin area. > > So - do you think we should have a LibreOffice web forum? > > Thanks > > Drew -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to [email protected] Archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/discuss/ *** All posts to this list are publicly archived for eternity ***
