I believe both mailing lists and forums have their merits. Mailing list are
great if you want to feel like an active member of the community and you want
to be right on top of every discussion. However mailing lists push information
to you and the only way to control information flow is by subscribing to lists
that you believe you have interest in and unsubscribing from those that you
have not.
In my opinion forums are great for building a large and diverse community.
First of all the filtering of information is based on pull. Typically a number
different forums is used, so that each of them may have a more specific user
community, for instance a beginner forum, developer forums, (tech) artist
forum etc. Further filtering exists in the fact that you only open topics if
they sound interesting. There exist statistics on the amount of activity of
members so valueing responses is easier. By gathering a layer of valuable and
respected people around the core developers (like in the Ogre forums) a lot of
FAQs will be caught without having the core team members to respond to all
questions.
In my perception forums will be more scalable if the user community grows,
because you can not expect every member to follow all discussions that are
currently happening (or happened if you were on vacation for two weeks).
my two cents,
Roland Smeenk
________________________________
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Ricko 3D
Sent: maandag 27 augustus 2007 6:07
To: osg-users@lists.openscenegraph.org
Subject: Re: [osg-users] Tutorials
> Nick Prudent wrote:
> There *is* an OSG discussion forum:
> http://www.3drealtimesimulation.com/3dsceneBB/index.php
> It's just not very official (and not used much, from what I can
see...).
Great! I'll bet it would be used much more if it were listed
prominently on the wiki like just below the mailing list link or on the getting
started page for example. I searched the wiki and found a link to an official
FAQ on that site but no links from the wiki to the forum at all.
> Jean-Sébastien wrote:
> you'll see the arguments for and against. A compromise
> may be reached, but the mailing list is here to stay.
> Most OSS projects have at least two mailing lists, some much more.
> It's a very effective means of discussing development subjects.
Thanks for the quick response. Seems funny to say anything is here to
stay related to any constantly evolving technology project, or anything related
to the Internet. I was just offering my observations coming at this project
fresh. My opinion was simply that the mailing list method seems outdated. I
wasn't suggesting it is not effective, just comparing it to the
features/benefits of newer community technologies I've used on other projects.
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