Adrien, 

[quote] Magnolia employees don't need/use the forum, do they?[/quote]

Well, they do quite a lot, if you look at the message count next to Jan (1337 
posts!). 

If you say we need to do something about the forum, I am the first to agree. 
However, this being our very own forum software, and it being open source, my 
hope would have been that those that have an itching start scratching it, so to 
speak. Pretty much all of the points you have listed could fairly easily be 
added to this forum, and that would provide Magnolia with a much better forum 
that everybody can install and use, free of charge. The infrastructure to do 
these things is there. But reality being what it is, the forum didn't get 
picked up by our community and improved – personally I think that is a missed 
opportunity, because forum (or shall I say social knowledge collaboration 
software ;-)) provides us with a unique opportunity. The Java world doesn't 
have a great open source forum. So that is the technical and community aspect 
for Magnolia. But again: if nobody starts improving this software, it will stay 
what it is. We can't put a lot of resources into it because we are busy 
improving Magnolia the CMS, not Magnolia the forum. However, if people start 
contributing, I'd be happy to arrange support from our side.

As somebody who has invested his life into bringing the world a better Java 
CMS, I am also a bit reluctant to shift the bulk of our community work to a new 
owner. Yes, SO will give us the great software without charging for it, but our 
cost is significant. This might of course be more on an emotional level than in 
terms of real hard dollars, as we don't earn anything from the forum, but I 
still consider it one of Magnolia's assets. Personally, I am proud that we have 
been able to build a strong community, and would love to keep it here on our 
sites, not somewhere out in the wild where I have zero control over what the 
new owners will do with it.

We have also considered buying Jive for that functionality, but it is rather 
expensive. tO sum up, we are aware of our current forum's limitations, 
currently have no resources to improve it from our end, but would like to keep 
the community on our infrastructure. However, it is not my decision to make. We 
follow the dynamics of the community, and if that takes us to SO, so be it. If 
on the other hand, this email helps to get some people's creative juices 
flowing, I would love to see our forum software improve and become an open 
source alternative to Jive.

-- 
Context is everything: 
http://forum.magnolia-cms.com/forum/thread.html?threadId=3159bdee-2ce9-4c00-8f6f-86dc2b8e0ab5


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