I would like to give an update about our forum evaluation. Further below I will address the major concerns that have been expressed by some of our users.
All in all we are very happy with the new forum. We did many customizations. Luke Daley did an amazing job of hooking into the default forum setup via JQuery and customizing things for our purpose. The forum in contrast to the mailing list now provides: - Editing of messages. - Code highlighting. - Snippets like GRADLE-1234 will be automatically converted into a link to the Jira issue. - Promotion of messages make it much easier to figure out the essential replies. - Our new forum also serves as our new blog: -- We have started a featured articles series: http://forums.gradle.org/gradle/tags/featured_article -- We have started a This week in Gradle series: http://forums.gradle.org/gradle/tags/this-week-in-gradle -- You can also subscribe to the RSS feed of any of those series. The mechanism is tag based. - The quality of service is better as we can easily detect unanswered questions. - You can subscribe to the RSS feeds for all new postings and replies. - Of course their are also the other advantages mentioned in the previous emails *Stuff we are not so happy with:* - Editing of messages seems to time out after while and the content becomes immutable. This is something we don't like and would like to see improved. - There is still no way for a normal user to get email notifications on all activities. Right now only the RSS feeds do work. We have a couple of options: 1.) Just stick with the RSS feeds. 2.) We are evaluating another method that might allow full email notifications in the forum. We would need to get some support from GetSatisfaction to make this work. 3.) As Moderators and Employees can get email notification we could set up a subscription solution ourselves. - We would love to be able to use a simple markup language like Markdown for formatting the content. We could try to add this ourselves. Not sure whether we will go down this route. - It is a good place to discuss ideas but the model of the forum is not so suitable for development discussions like 'how should we reorganize the packaging', ... So we will keep the dev list. But we will use the dev list not for all kind of development discussions. Stuff that fits into the forum like problems and ideas will be discussed there. *Concerns that users have expressed:* - The forum is great for newbies but the advanced users would rather prefer a mailing list and will stay away from the forum. I don't think this will be an issue at all. The way our forum works is more like a community portal. We use it ourselves for sharing problems and proposing ideas. We use it as a blog like mechanism for all kinds of detailed and advanced stuff we want to communicate. I would say in particular the power users will get more out of the forum than out of the current mailing list as it is so much nicer and convenient to feed it with content. - If there is no mechanism to get notified about all events people will become less involved. We fully agree with this. The RSS feeds are working now. See above for the current state for complete email notifications. How do we proceed? Once we have a clear strategy for solving the email notifications our current plan is to make the forum replace the user mailing list. We are looking forward to your feedback. Hans -- Hans Dockter Founder, Gradle http://www.gradle.org, http://twitter.com/gradleware CEO, Gradleware - Gradle Training, Support, Consulting http://www.gradleware.com On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 4:42 PM, Hans Dockter <[email protected]>wrote: > Hello, > > we at Gradleware have been exploring different technologies and approaches > that we could put in place to help members of the Gradle community ask > questions, raise problems and share ideas. > > Until now, our user mailing list has been the primary channel for this kind > of thing. While this has worked reasonably well we feel that the Gradle > community deserves better, so we went looking for alternatives. > > We wanted a system that: > > - Makes it incredibly easy for people to join and participate (as much or > as little as they want) > - Allows people to find, focus on and participate in topics relevant to > them (and not to be bombarded with noise about topics they aren't) > - Allows editing, tagging and threaded replies. This is essential for using > it as a high quality knowledge database. > - Allows better community participation (e.g. voting) > - Allows for a better quality of service (e.g. make it easy to find all > unanswered topics) > - Supports basic formatting, including syntax highlighting > - Allows “canonical” answers to questions to be highlighted out of all the > replies to a question/topic (for easy finding) > - Provides RSS feeds and email > - Allows community champions/experts to be recognized. > > After evaluating several different options, we found that GetSatisfaction > provided the best platform and we think it will serve the Gradle community > the best. > > We would like to get your opinion and feedback on this endeavour and > solicit your help to kickstart this new initiative that we are calling the > “Gradle Forums”. > > You can create your account and log in to the forums right now @ > http://forums.gradle.org/ > > We are still in the process of applying some customizations to the site and > exploring it ourselves. Please feel free to log in and post questions, share > ideas, report problems and do anything else that you can on the forums. > Content can either be real (e.g. real problems you encounter) or just made > up stuff for the sake of playing with the site. Before launching to the > whole community we'll go through and remove any “play” content. > > While we at Gradleware are confident in this new forum, we are still > evaluating and we really need your feedback and opinions to ensure that this > is going to work well for the Gradle community. We hope that the Gradle > Forums will replace the mailing list very soon as the main community > discussion and support mechanism. > > If you have any questions/suggestions/feedback about the new forums, or the > initiative in general, please use the new forums site to post it. We'll be > watching, and it will be a good way to get a feel for it. Of course an email > is also appreciated. > > Thanks for being part of the initiative. > > Hans > > -- > Hans Dockter > Founder, Gradle > http://www.gradle.org, http://twitter.com/gradleware > CEO, Gradleware - Gradle Training, Support, Consulting > http://www.gradleware.com >
