On 6 Oct 12, at 17:12, Giuliano Colla wrote: > Cephas Atheos ha scritto: > [..] > > > > I knew that I wasn't going to convince anyone who wasn't willing to give > > new technology a fair go! But we do need to at least be fair with our > > evaluation of technology, not just go with what we know and love. It's not > > fair to the users who may not know the difference, or who may have been > > genuinely interested in better ways of communicating with everyone else > > here. > > > [...] > > I'm afraid that you're are under the false impression of talking to a > newbee audience, who's never seen a forum in his life. > > The sample forum you proposed is very similar to the one I did set up > for a cultural association I'm member of. It uses the same tools and . . > Please do follow Graeme suggestions, and concentrate where problems > exist, and improvements would be welcome. Fpc/Lazarus Wiki search is a > nightmare, because there's no decent content based indexing: if what > you're searching for is not on a page title it can't be found. Fpc > website usability is very poor. In those fields more modern tools, and > someone willing to devote some time would help a lot.
To be fair, it's probably useful to mention that the example forum prepared by Peter should be better compared to the forum we currently provide on FPC pages (community.freepascal.org) rather than NNTP newsgroups, etc., which we do not provide at the moment anyway. There _are_ issues with the existing WWW forum (e.g. the notifications work incorrectly). I do not say that it is the most important problem of our WWW site, but there is still some room for improvement there. Nevertheless, the provided example shall be accompanied by description of the supposed transition scenario. First of all, it is important to understand whether the created example was meant to replace just the existing WWW forum or the whole site (possibly including the Wiki, bug tracker, etc.) / supporting infrastructure. If it's the former, alright, let's discuss advantages and disadvantages compared to our current one with regard to all aspects (usability, features, involved infrastructure, security, operability and support of the forum software, etc.). At the end, we can put the advantages and disadvantages on one page and then decide whether to change or not. As an example, one disadvantage I can see so far is that it lacks the benefit of very easy (and user controlled) possibility of localization to other languages. That feature is actually used right now and there are quite a few localizations available (partly created by our users) matching the possibility to discuss FPC related questions also in other languages than just English (which is important for some our users who do not speak English so well). Sacrificing that feature may be an option, but we should understand the reasons for doing so. Another question - is the forum structure supposed to be part of the proposal? If yes, it would be useful to get some arguments why this structure fits better than the current one. In my opinion, the prepared structure focuses too much on just installing and specific architectures and too little to general cross-platform development (which is one of the FPC strengths and an important benefit of FPC). If the proposal was meant to replace the whole FPC site (as potentially suggested e.g. by mentioning the download options on a very prominent place and not having links to the other WWW resources like the bug tracker), I have sincere doubts. I hope that it wasn't meant that way, but I'll wait for the response. If the prepared sample forum is supposed to replace not only the existing WWW forum but also the existing mailing lists (completely)? This hasn't been stated (yet), although I suspect that it might have been meant that way based on some previous statements. If this is the case, it would be useful to provide some statements regarding different access options - even 'up to date' forum solutions like Google Groups provide options for accessing the fora via e-mail (in both directions, i.e. for both reading and responding). Is something like that supported by the created example in order to provide benefits of both approaches (again related to description of supposed transition from the current state mentioned above)? Tomas _______________________________________________ fpc-other maillist - fpc-other@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-other
