At 5:45 PM -0500 2/10/15, Lawrence Velázquez wrote:
Having both forums and mailing lists would be
harmful to the community. We'd end up with two
bubbles (one much smaller, probably) that don't
interact with each other.
The only way forums would work is if we migrated *all* discussion there.
The MythTV project set up an online forum a year
ago in addition to the mythtv-users mailing list.
I'd say the experience there is that the two
bubbles that don't interact much...but that is
not a bad thing.
Mailing list volume is basically unchanged since
the forum went live. The forum is still growing
every month and now gets several thousand
visitors per month. The biggest volume of
MythTV-via-Macports support that I do is via the
forum. But I still follow the mythtv-users
mailing list and answer questions there, as well.
As I see it, there are folks who ONLY do mailing
lists and folks who ONLY do forums. (And a few
of us gluttons that do both.) I suspect that a
MacPorts forum would be viable if a few of the
usual suspects would answer questions on it. A
forum would provide a venue for folks that are
not comfortable with subscribing to a mailing
list.
Forums do offer a couple of advantages over
mailing lists. The key one is: images inline
with text. A user can post screen shots together
with a description of their issue. Obviously
there are ways to achieve much the same result
with mailing lists but the integration on a forum
thread is very nice.
OTOH, a forum takes work to set up and maintain.
I'm not volunteering to do it. But if a forum
is created, I'll add it to the list that I check
and probably answer questions when I can.
Overall, the MythTV experience shows a forum
would not be harmful to the community NOR that
we'd have to migrate all discussion there.
Craig
PS Some forums can be set up to send you an email
when a sub-forum or topic is updated (after your
last visit). I don't know of any that allow you
to send an email that becomes a posting, however.
PPS One could argue that IRC and mailing lists
serve basically the same purpose and it is
redundant to have both!
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