It's difficult. The people who don't like forums don't like them because forums don't take a nice, clean, top-down, structured approach. This is true of course, forums are informal, are quite often rambling, but they can also be very friendly places.
I don't know how many people have downloaded and installed QGIS over the years. Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, perhaps. My guess would be that most of these people were not trained GIS professionals at all and they won't have nice, top-down structured brains. They'll be like me, wanting to start in the middle with something they half-understand and then work outwards from there. I don't think that Stack Exchange will suit them (for reasons that I mentioned earlier) nor I think will this place (Quantum GIS - User). For what it's worth, I still believe that QGIS needs an informal, friendly place of first resort for newcomers and the less-experienced. Everyone has to start somewhere and the most important thing is to get them doing something, anything. Plot a few GPS tracks, trace a few shapes from Google Earth and turn them into a map, anything to get them going. Having said all this, I still don't know about the best way forward. The old forum was good, Google Groups are good too. As suggested, even a new list on Nabble perhaps, informal and aimed at newcomers and the less-experienced, a beginners corner. A new list on Nabble would at least fit into an existing hierarchy, if this is important. -- View this message in context: http://osgeo-org.1560.n6.nabble.com/Closure-of-forum-tp4674587p4676332.html Sent from the Quantum GIS - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ Qgis-user mailing list Qgis-user@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-user