Hi everyone, I've had the thought over the last few months to get rid of this mailing list/Google group, and move all discussions about Semantic Forms over to the two Semantic MediaWiki mailing lists: semediawiki-user (for users), and semediawiki-devel (for developers).
When this list was started about two years ago, Semantic Forms was a very new and rather buggy extension for SMW; at this point, it's in use on I believe something like 80% of active SMW installations. It's still buggy, :) but the posts on the list are less about bugs now and more about usage and feature requests. So you could say that the SF mailing list has been a victim of its own success: due to the technical improvements and community support that the mailing list has enabled, SF has become a stable part of what people consider to be SMW, and thus there's less of a need to have a separate discussion area. If you're curious, you can see the monthly volume of emails on the three lists here: http://groups.google.com/group/semantic-forms/about http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_name=semediawiki-user http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_name=semediawiki-devel There are currently about 100 messages a month to the SF mailing list, and a slightly higher number of the semediawiki-user list, and about 50 a month on the semediawiki-devel list. Altogether, I don't think getting rid of this list would overwhelm the other two, especially since (a) some emails are sent to both the SF and SMW-user list, and (b) other questions sent to the SF list are really about SMW or one of the other extensions. I see a number of advantages in moving everything to the two SMW mailing lists: 1. one less mailing list for users to join 2. reduced confusion about which mailing list to write to for which questions, especially the borderline cases, such as anything to do with templates 3. makes it clearer that Semantic Forms is a part of the SMW world, as opposed to some specialized application 4. increases the feeling of a single SMW community, that one can address all of at the same time 5. allows separation of emails about Semantic Forms development from those about SF usage, since they'd now be on separate lists On the other hand, I can think of two disadvantages: 1. it increases email volume to people who really only want to be on one list or the other. There may be people on this list who don't want to get general emails about SMW (though I think that would be a mistake); and of course there will be people on the semediawiki-user list who aren't interested in SF. I should note that, even if people on this list think it's a good idea, I would still need to get permission from the SMW mailing list people, so the second one is really a separate issue. 2. the SMW mailing lists have a pretty shoddy track record of accepting emails from new users - sometimes emails wait for a week or longer before getting confirmed. I probably won't do the move unless I can get myself and the other administrators of this list to be made administrators of the SMW lists as well; which would hopefully speed things up quite a bit. And there might be more I haven't thought of. Any thoughts? -Yaron --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Semantic Forms" group. To post to this group, send email to semantic-forms@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to semantic-forms+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/semantic-forms?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
