On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 6:16 PM, Hani Suleiman <[email protected]> wrote:

>
> On Sep 12, 2011, at 12:08 PM, Luke Daley wrote:
>
> > Unfortunately you can't post via email, but you can receive notifications
> of content.
> >
> > You can configure your notifications here:
> http://forums.gradle.org/me/notifications
> >
> > It strikes me know that this page's existence is not very obvious so I'll
> put something on the front page.
> >
> The problem with all online forums without mailing list integration is an
> issue of discovery.
>
> For example, let's say user A asks about feature Y. As user B, I happen to
> know the answer and have useful things to say. With the new system, I would
> never see the issue unless I specifically go to the forums and look for it.
>
> The email notification functionality is nowhere near as useful, as it would
> only notify me on threads that I have explicitly participated in or chose to
> watch. Unless there's a way to say 'send me all posts regardless of me
> registering interest'? I guess RSS is another option for that.
>

I fully agree with that point. There must be an easy way to have an
read-only access of everything that is going on.


>
> In my experience forums attract more newbieish users (a good thing), but
> also end up with a lot less of a community, with responders dwindling to the
> 'official' or invested participants (employees, people running a support
> company, or trying to grow the business etc).
>

I see what you are saying and I know a couple of communities where this
happened.

The mailing list has served a couple of purposes:

- Knowledge Database
- Problems/Issues
- Announcements
- Questions
- General Discusssion
- Ideas

For some scenarios it was suitable for others it was not a very good
solution I think.

One reason why we've chosen GetSatisfaction is that it is not just a plain
Q&A forum. It provides a deeper model for all of the above usage scenarios.
For example questions, problems and ideas each has a defined set of states
which are visually represented and where you have build-in queries for. This
makes it a high level issue tracker. For many problems our users won't need
to go into Jira anymore. They can track it via the forum. And there is only
one datasource to query to know what's going on.

For the scenario of a knowledge database, you can finally edit content and
promote particular answers. Thus the content and what is the promoted answer
can change over time as Gradle evolves.

GetSatisfaction provides Jira and Pivotal tracker integration. For Jira
integration see here:
https://www.pivotaltracker.com/help/integrations?version=v3#get_satisfaction

This is in beta right now. We plan to join the beta program.

So this forum is planned to be a primary entry point for all kind of things.
We also want it to be deeply integrated with the other tools we are using.
In that respect it is much better for the newbie. But the way we plan to use
it will also make it very useful for the advanced users and hopefully they
stay involved. We will definitely provide the input that makes it
interesting for them to stay.

For me this is an important piece in our effort to improve communication
with the community.

Hans

--
Hans Dockter
Founder, Gradle
http://www.gradle.org, http://twitter.com/gradleware
CEO, Gradleware - Gradle Training, Support, Consulting
http://www.gradleware.com



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