Hi All, While I don't use or am involved in the admin/maintenence of the forum.openscenegraph.org I am aware of the increase problems that users of the forum are having. New users in particular seem hardest hit waiting for approval. I believe the issue stems from the lack of moderators to manage the forum. Art Tevs the creator of the forum now working in a job that doesn't involve the OSG we no longer have anyone able to keep things ticking on the forum day in day out. Calls or moderators and a replacement admin for the forum have gone out over the last few years and apart from one person stepping forward the calls have gone ignored by the forum community. Unfortuantely that lone person who volunteered does not look to be still actively moderatoring the forum, not suprising really as it's a job that really needs to be shared amoungst the community.
The situation is pretty sad, both from how bad an experience that forum users now get and just how little effort forum users themselves are willing to help manage the forum. Not only will this be damaging the forum users experience but also will damanging the OSG project as a whole, great community support is something that the OSG used to known for, but now the majority of new users who go the forum route will be get stonewalled by the lack of moderator to approve and manage new users and threads. The OSG-3.2 release was the quietest I've ever seen in terms of community activity testing out release candidates, partly this will be down to summer holidays, but I also believe it's likely due to problems with forum. Less testing means more build breaks and bugs get through the net so long term this is likely to result in a real struggle to maintain the quality of software for all users. Fixing support issues will help testing and debugging process and help drive quality improvements. What to do? Short term we need volunteers that can help out with moderating the forum and start clearing the backlog. If you want to volunteer then please email me directly, or step forward on this thread. I don't personal know the details of what moderating exactly involves or how to set you up so I'll have to defer to Art Tevs or others that have done it in the past. What I do know is that lots of people sitting on their hands expecting others to pick up the slack hasn't worked and won't work. The short term route is to fall back to the osg-users mailing list, over the years has been very reliable with just a few outages due to server issues, and while I'm the admin it really doesn't take me much work to maintain. The OSG community grew up around the mailing list and while new users seem to prefer using forums the mailing list has remained a back bone. In terms of falling back perhaps we should not be listing the forum on website, or at least notifiing it's currently having problems and point new users and existing users of the forum to the mailing list to get reliable support. Longer term I'm open to suggestions. I believe having one community for support is important - I simply don't have the time to do support on both mailing list and forum. Personally I really dislike using forums - I find them unproducttive and disjointed, any time I get a private message through the forum I hate it as I have to jump through hoops just to answer what should be just a couple clicks if it had been an email. The dual forum - mailing list that we have had when it worked well was pretty impressive with posts to the forum and mailing list being cross posted reasonably reliable. There have been problems though - attachments are unreliable on the forum especially when being posted to the mailing list, also forum users tend to converse in slightly different ways to way people do on mailing lists. Might there be better mailing list/forum solutions out there? I'm open to suggestions, so let's here what you think and what you'll be able to help with :-) Robert. _______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
