On 31/07/11 20:05, Rob Weir wrote:
What I would like to discuss here is what we do with the forums. In the
four years since their creation, we have added another 8 language forums to
the original English one: French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Hungarian,
Japanese, Chinese and Vietnamese. Across all forums we have some 75,000
registered members, who have created 300,000 posts on 78,000 topics. We have
also gone through 5 phpBB version upgrades.
However, the main use of the forums is not by the posting members, but by
guest users who browse these topics to find answers to their OOo problems
and the search engines which index the forum content. We get roughly
200,000 page requests / day (that is web pages -- the images, CSS, etc. add
~4 x in terms of Apache requests).
My reason for providing this volumetrics is to put the forums' usage
into context: quite possibly higher than all of the Apache incubator
projects combined.
Right. This was discussed on this list in the early days of the
project. The typical Apache way to handle user support is via a user
mailing list. But I think it was generally acknowledged that this
would not be sufficient for Apache OpenOffice. The traffic would be
very high and that in itself would deter both users from subscribing
to ask questions as well as experts from subscribing to answer them.
Forums handle that kind of usage pattern better.
It was also brought up that we might want to try a specialized Q&A
service, like StackExchange, for support. Systems like these have
mechanisms for rating questions and answers, and earning points for
giving good answers, etc. So there is an aspect of crowd moderation
to it.
But so far no one has stepped up to migrate the forums or start something new.
Not quite correct. I have previously discussed my supporting the
rehoming both the forums and the wiki on Apache infrastructure with you
and other project members off DL
Migrating this knowledge to another application which does not preserve
logical data models (viz any other application) would be a project
beyond the capability of this team.
On the customizations, are they purely UI, or do we have functional
patches as well?
See
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/User:TerryE/phpBB3.0.7_Upgrade/Closed_Issues_and_Actions#Forum_Customisation
Apache has a "menu" of services it makes available to projects,
including wikis, mailings lists, Subversion repositories, etc. If we
want to get something added to that "menu", like phpBB, then we need
volunteers to work with Apache Infrastructure to get it supported.
This would require a critical mass of admin volunteers able and
willing to support phpBB.
I agree. The alternative to getting this support within Apache.org is
to discard the knowledge in 300,000 posts across the 9 forums. The user
community forums would probably explore alternatives if this looked
likely to happen. The OOo wiki contains 10,521 content pages and
11.338 uploaded files. These form a critical service to the end-user
community. Note that the cwiki markup format doesn't support many of
the MediaWiki specific markups in this content.
Regards
Terry
