In my admittedly short time hanging around gNewSense I've never liked having separate forums and a mailing list. Others seems to like having the forums, though, so I've never said anything but it seems (to me) to artifically divide the community between those on the forums and those on the list. There could be the same people in each area, but not necessarily.
I've been operating and maintaining a forum powered by phpBB for several years and found it to be very extensible. I see that a Gmane-type thing was discussed in the list archives. It would prevent such a web/list division from happening, but there is forum software that can integrate with mailing lists, so this division doesn't have to exist. phpBB doesn't have this functionality built-in but I believe that there are free software plugins to accomplish it. Other forum software has the functionality built-in. It seems that integrating the the mailing lists and the web should be a requirement for a cople of reasons: I think that it would prevent a separate forum entity from becoming "a place for dirty hacks, recommending poor software, and generally bad advice" (a quote form Karl in an earlier thread) since everyone in the community -- both forum and list -- could see the discussions and step in and put the kibosh on something if needed. Another concern mentioned previously is a rescue method for the information as well as the long-term viability of such a project if someone should take it on. Since the data would also be picked up by the list archive, all messages and data would be preserved in the list archives should the forum operator/maintainer lose interest, or if the forum died for whatever other reason. The same can't necessarily be said if the forum is maintained as a separate entity from the mailing lists. Just my 2 cents. _______________________________________________ gNewSense-dev mailing list gNewSense-dev@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnewsense-dev