The mailing list may be *easy* to sign up for, but it is a pain in the neck to find information on. If you want the answer to one question, you must *subscribe* to the mailing list. You may decide to do a google search for your answer, but I will tell you that every question I have researched this way has returned results for several different rails apps, and not just typo specifically. It's frustrating. And when the question is one you are SURE has been asked before, a person is not likely to feel that the question is welcome on the mailing list.
Another disadvantage to the mailing list is that I have to receive EVERY thread, regardless of weather or not I give a crap about it. Yes, all of my typo list stuff is filtered to its own box, but still, watching one thread is not convenient. As far as the gmane thing, its nice to have them suck up the info, but the fact is the info is re-displayed in a flat out ugly way. For a piece of software that is so beautiful to use, it sure is ugly trying to get support for it. There is just no elegance in a mailing list/NNTP/gmane support system, backed up by Trac, which while a good ticked and development tracking system, is certainly not the ideal solution for a primary website for something like typo. I don't really know what Typo's plans are as far as what it wants to become. With the recent theme promotion and contest, it really seemed like typo was trying to reach out to the masses and say, look at me! But many people will be discouraged by the current support system, especially if they are used to the much more popular support system, the forum. If Typo wants to become the popular blogging system it deserves to be, it is going to need a more available format. NNTP is nice, but still requires news software to access. I can't get to it from the office at my day job, or from an international internet cafe. My point is this: a forum is plain EASY to use and everyone is familiar with the concepts. Patching together multiple various technologies and relying GOOGLE to be the lists search engine (which of course wont index every day) is not strong enough to escalate Typo to the usership of other popular systems. Unless the idea is to keep out everyone except those who are already rails initiates, I cannot think of a good reason not to use a forum. On Dec 3, 2005, at 5:57 PM, Justus Pendleton wrote: > Freedom Dumlao wrote: >> Why don't we have any typo forums? > > Gmane has a mailing list gateway that presents the list via NNTP > and two > different web interfaces. You can see it here: > > http://blog.gmane.org/gmane.comp.web.typo.user > > If the list admins for this group don't mind I'll send email to the > gmane people today or tomorrow and have them import the typo list > archives into gmane. > >> I think a forum might be easier to access than the mailing list > > I think that might be part of why there isn't a forum ;-) Is figuring > out how to subscribe to a mailing list really that big of a hurdle for > someone who wants to run a commercially unsupported blog system that > depends on a web framework that hasn't had its official 1.0 release > yet > and is written in a language that a lot of hosting providers don't > support? > >> would be much easier to search through and access for new users? > > You can search the mailing list pretty easily with google right now. > Try "site:http://rubyforge.org/pipermail/typo-list/ truncate table > users", for instance. Of course that could be made easier by adding a > simple form to the typo website. If gmane imports the archives > then you > can search them from there, as well. > > -- > Justus > _______________________________________________ > Typo-list mailing list > Typo-list at rubyforge.org > http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/typo-list
