'Twas brillig, and Matthew Weier O'Phinney at 24/02/09 13:40 did gyre
and gimble:
-- vadim gavrilov <[email protected]> wrote
(on Tuesday, 24 February 2009, 03:02 PM +0200):
Just a general questions, Why isn't there a Peer-to-Peer Technical Support
forums for the Zend Framework? I mean the mailing list is ok and we get our
qeustions answered but having some kind of a forum where developers could share
ideas, tips, help each other (without relying on the mailing list) and show
some application examples (code snippets) will be a very good addition to the
already large community of developers. With a forum software you could also
easly search things that were already asked and answered, You could archive
topics and posts (unlike the current mailing archive) and i think alot more.
I am pretty sure this will just benefit the ZF developer community, The
questions is why something like this wasn't already made?
We have an IRC channel: #zftalk on Freenode. If you want immediate
connection to other developers and want to share code, that's the best
place to go.
We explicitly made the decision not to do a web-based forum as we wanted
to minimize the number of support channels we needed to monitor. Most of
the internal team are not fond of forums and prefer email as it's easier
to filter and manage; when you're dealing with many thousands of
messages a month, a forum becomes too difficult to monitor.
However, we *have* integrated the mailing lists with Nabble, which gives
many of the benefits of a forum, while still keeping the benefits of a
mailing list. We have Nabble embedded on the archives page:
http://framework.zend.com/archives
and you can search posts there.
Huge +1 from me.
Personally, If find forums a PITA. They are great for one-off help or
for hobbyist, but for people who work on this stuff day in and day out,
having mailing lists is, quite frankly the *only* way to go.
To elaborate, I am currently involved with about 25 different projects
in one way or another. In total this works out at about 40 different
mailing lists I subscribe to and try to keep vaguely abreast of.
If this were done through forums, I would have to login to at least 25
different websites to check for new and interesting things people have
said. This means my daily trawl would take me to multiple different
website, with different styles, layouts and fonts. In the end this would
probably take several hours.
With mailing lists I have one simple UI I can use. The information is
pushed (or if you use e.g. Gmane.org as I do, pulled via NNTP) into your
preferred client software to organise as you see fit. Standard layout,
standard ways of threading, standard fonts and colours. This makes
keeping up to date possible for me. Doing things with forums would
simply not work.
So while I think forums have their place, it would just not feasible for
me to participate in the projects I do if they used forums as their
primary communications channel.
This is also why rules on HTML emails (don't send them!) and accepted
practices (e.g. selective quoting and no top-posting) are generally good
ideas. Consistency means efficiency when you are dealing with multiple
projects and lists!
I didn't mean the above to sound like a rant, but it came out a bit like
that!! :p
Col
--
Colin Guthrie
gmane(at)colin.guthr.ie
http://colin.guthr.ie/
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