Hi all, I have a suggestion for one of the alternatives to consider when deciding where to move future discussions: Atlassian's "Confluence" software/service. It's basically a very streamlined / polished collaboration system, which I think would be a good replacement for either an email list or a forum (or worse, splitting activity between the two). Think: company intranet meets knowledgebase meets Quora.
I don't like forums because they're generally very archaic (not having changed much since the 1990s), and as others have mentioned, it's often difficult to track all the discussions. People not using their real identities can also be a problem. Overall they're kind of a usability nightmare but people keep using them because they're easy to set up and it's a paradigm everybody is familiar with. An email list is a little better (when used with modern webmail and filtering/foldering), but that has its own problems -- primarily the complete lack of structure or tagging or categorization, etc. It's great for up-to-the-minute interaction, but one can't really just browse noise-free topics the way you would a knowledgebase or wiki. Whereas with something like Confluence you can create pages/sub-pages that anybody can edit or add comments to discuss (with document versioning, no less). And there's a nice overview so you can see at a glance what everybody's talking about, what pages have been updated recently, etc. There's specifically a Quora-like "Questions" module which would be the immediate replacement for a lot of the mailing list traffic. Also nice is a partitioning system called "spaces" which would facilitate dedicated areas for pure Softimage, collaboration on post-XSI pipelines and tools, and maybe even a dedicated altar of Autodesk hate ;) As others have mentioned, the point is to preserve and encourage the collective passion of this existing group in a single place, regardless of which tools people ultimately end up using. As a natural harvester/hoarder of information, I would very much like to see something a lot more structured than conventional options. I'm not saying it has to be a freakin' Wikipedia, but there's a lot of great knowledge that's strewn about si-community and this email list, which is not easily discovered or referred to. But even with that structure, the water-cooler nature of this list wouldn't be lost, either. Seeing as I'm unemployed (by choice), I personally have a lot of time I could devote to administrating something like this and getting it off the ground. I can't promise I would perform that function *indefinitely*, but ... who else could spend 8+ hours a day for the next few weeks getting everything in order and showing people the ropes? Pretty sure ADSK ain't gonna do it :) Just one problem: this stuff ain't free<https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/pricing>, though there's a 30-day trial. Depending on how many people are ultimately active, it could end up being up to about $5-8 dollars per user per month. If you're a studio and making money from keeping current on your tools, that should easily be worth the money. But even if you're a freelancer or developer, that kind of deep interaction with a vibrant (post-)Softimage community would be priceless. Presumably. (By the way, I'm not volunteering myself to collect the funds -- should be somebody everybody knows/trusts) I'm not necessarily married to Confluence. Really anything that facilitates structure (while not sacrificing near-realtime interaction) I'd be willing to put my time into. I'm a jack-of-all-trades programmer who can probably figure most things out, and even make modifications if I really have to -- though web stuff is my least favorite kind of programming. Thoughts?
