hi, after reading todays discussion on our limited capacity to manage forums because to many spam users sign up and it is extra work to monitor yet another area the following two random ideas popped in my head:
moderate forum registration: don't allow spambots to sign up by requesting a verbal description of why the user wants to join. or have them request a forum account in person on irc. (this may not be worth the effort, but it would certainly help cut down spam registrations) can we turn the issue tracker into a forum? after all most forum posts will be questions that need an answer from devs, not sozialising. we would just need a simplified form that would create an issue with a default priority and a category eg "user question". this has a few advantages: we can track all questions and make sure they get answers. we can mark answered questions as done. we can elevate questions that point to bugs to a real issue. we can assign questions to the right person to answer. if there is a public filter that can be linked to, people can browse the questions. users can see the status of a question, and thus have more assurance that the answer solves the problem. people should get used to browsing and using the issue tracker for issues anyways. any user can post to any issue already, thus a discussion like in a forum is possible. also, categories can be finetuned and be like a list of different forums with different topics. this would make the forum more like a helpdesk, which in a way is is, i think, and the difference from a helpdesk to an issue tracker is not large, it's all just a question of appearance. greetings, martin. -- cooperative communication with sTeam - caudium, pike, roxen and unix searching contract jobs: programming, training and administration - anywhere -- pike programmer working in china community.gotpike.org foresight developer (open-steam|caudium).org foresightlinux.org unix sysadmin iaeste.at realss.com Martin Bähr http://www.iaeste.or.at/~mbaehr/ is.schon.org _______________________________________________ Foresight-devel mailing list Foresight-devel@lists.rpath.org http://lists.rpath.org/mailman/listinfo/foresight-devel
