On Dec 3, 2005, at 3:43 AM, jonasb.16759522 at bloglines.com wrote: > If there is going to be a forum, please make sure the mailing list > and the > forum is synced. I like the way it works for the Rails mailing list > on http://www.ruby-forum.com. > Perhaps Typo can get a forum there?
I second this. It does no good to balkanize the user community by making an artificial separation between whatever method of passing group messages floats your personal boat, whether it be web-forums or wikis or mailing lists or NNTP or a snail-mailed newsletter. There is no single "silver bullet" for effective communication with any single group of end users. The various tools should be tied as strongly as possible so that people providing help can communicate it to all points in one action without having to repeat themselves. There are pluses and minuses to all the methods above, despite the inability of the advocates and detractors of each to admit it. ;-) Down one of the other branches of the thread someone talked about Trac's perceived ugliness. It can be prettied up quite a bit, the Colloquy trac install at http://project.colloquy.info/trac/ is a good example of what can be done to integrate it nicely into a static site of pages. FWIW, I prefer (a) NNTP newsreaders (b) mailing list (c) gmane's web interface in that order. Scrolling around, opening a tab for every thread, and waiting for the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc. pages to load in most web forums is more than I care to deal with. That and most web forums are pretty much unusable surfing from my PDA. My needs, of course, may not reflect those of the larger user community or you, so please lower your flamethrower. If someone is really worked up about this they should put the energy into making it happen; if it takes off then it was meant to be, if not c'est la vie. __ wac
