Thinking about the website got me wondering about if people might be in to
featuring http://gis.stackexchange.com/tags/geoserver more prominently?
We already get 10 - 20 geoserver related questions there a week, so there's
already an active community answering stuff. I know Andrea and Ian are on
it. But if you go to http://geoserver.org/display/GEOS/Mailing+Lists or
anywhere else on the website you wouldn't find out about it as a resource.
In the last couple months I helped move CartoDB community support over
there from a google group, and it's gone really well. The advantages I see:
* Auto completion of common questions - as you start to type in a question
it will automatically suggest existing questions that may have already
answered it. So can reduce people asking the same questions.
* Gamification elements of giving people awards keep question answers more
involved, while answering questions on the mailing list is a much more
thankless task that has fallen much more on core developers.
* Overlaps with other gis software. We often get questions that aren't
_really_ pure geoserver questions, and people have to email multiple lists
to get their answer. With stack exchange they can just tag 'geoserver'
'openlayers' and 'postgis' and people can help out from each community.
Disadvantages may include that it's running on proprietary software,
building our knowledge base on a third party. And that it could potentially
split our community and have even less answers on the mailing list.
Right now I'm just suggesting we add some links to the website so more
people know about it as a resource. We could make it a stronger
recommendation (the first place to go).
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