While I agree with everything Josh has written below, I’m loathe to let go of the mailing list. I fear/suspect that shifting to a “forum only” will lead to a decline in participation and or attrition.
In my particular case, IT is just one of the many hats I wear, if I have to proactively go to a forum, I won’t go unless I have a problem. It’s not because I don’t want to help but rather, that I don’t have the time and it’s not top of mind. The open source mail server I use hosts a forum. When I was first deploying the server, I went to the forum frequently. The developer also had a point person who was very active in the forums answering questions and providing updates on the development plans. When answers from the developers slowed and development updates slowed, participation in the forums waned. Now, I visit my mail server forums maybe once every three months and there is very little activity. For me, the mailing list is a good thing. I’m much more familiar with Sipx because of the mailing list and, I’m more likely to contribute when I can with the mailing list than with a forum. Just my $.02 Paul From: Josh M. Patten [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, August 13, 2010 12:46 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [sipx-users] Mailing list or forum I think it’s time this was revisited. Now that sipX as a whole has gained traction and started attracting users the mailing lists have started to, in my opinion, get out of hand. I open my mail client this morning and was greeted by 60 new sipx-users mailing list messages. That’s right 60. I could spend 20 minutes sifting through them all, ignoring bottom posters as usual, or I could just mark them all read and possibly miss out on a good post or an opportunity to help someone. Or they could all be laid out in a nice easy to use forum format that allows everyone to easily glean relevant information in a uniform format. Let’s face it: it’s not very intuitive to create code blocks in an email client. I would like some opinions from the crowd here. I think the mailing list has become difficult to use and it should be replaced by a forum. The current forum-mailing list integration is half ass (don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the effort). It requires that members register for both the forum AND the mailing list and it doesn’t allow for categorization of threads. Let the discussion begin.
_______________________________________________ sipx-users mailing list [email protected] List Archive: http://list.sipfoundry.org/archive/sipx-users/
