On 1/26/06, Sonja Krause-Harder <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Why? What would you expect from it, compared to the existing SUSE > community forums?
The why: Web forums promotes communication between people no matter what their technical level. Mailing lists very nearly discourage newbies from helping newbies, as mailing lists usually stop this by complaining about the wrong quoting method or posting in HTML, or off-topic. DO NOT underestimate the power and learning experience of several newbies figuring something out because they were able to communicate and share information. Mailing lists can not support the volume of messages required to provide a voice to all levels of the openSUSE community. For this reason I think people who talk about links between the web forum and the mailing list, have not fully understood what a web forum is about. An openSUSE web forum should collectively accross topics have thousands of messages per day. Some forums may be clearly linked to a mailing list and marked as such (like some in www.ubuntuforums.org) A successful forum in my opionion will become much more important and larger fountain of knowledge than the wiki will be. Then there are whole lot of benefits that have been covered many times before since I originally brought up the web forum topic on this mailing list (many betas ago), like the current discussion and archive are one and the same, there are others, but I'll leave it as an exercise for you to find them in the archive to further prove how temporal a mailing list is. Why not the existing community forums? 1. One login would be better. 2. forum.opensuse.org essential in my opinion, I believe that one official forum will be bigger and more succesfull, than existing ones combined. Yes this will harm or even kill off existing community forums unless they find a niche. But the same argument can be made with the wiki, there are community SUSE wiki's that are harmed by the openSUSE wiki, but there are no complaints bringing in more languages (which will harm even more community wikis). So in summary: I believe that a Web forum will allow the openSUSE community of all levels to grow (and provide stickiness to opensuse.org), I don't believe that it will harm or divide the technical expertise on existing opensuse.org mailing lists. Instead I think it will allow the mailing lists to actually discuss the topics intended. There is an army of users without a voice, give them one... Peter 'Pflodo' Flodin
