===== ABSTRACT: Looking for more cooperation between KDE Community Forums and development teams.
===== FULL MESSAGE: Hello all, This mail was sent to members of many KDE (related) development teams. We would like to make a few suggestions that could be of benefit to us all. These suggestions concern hosting forums for specific applications, hosting private, restricted forums for your team, sending forum posts to IRC channels, and sending forum posts to Jabber accounts. While KDE gains popularity, it gets less 'nerdy'. Altough we all agree this is a good thing, we must also be aware of the fact that new ways of communicating must be investigated: many of the new users (and even some of the old ones) may prefer other channels of communication than IRC or mailing lists. The KDE Community Forums [1] try to fill a gap here. We are aware of the fact that developers (usually) prefer IRC and mailing lists. We are also aware of the fact that many users don't. This is why we developed (and will continue to develop) a few ways to bring these ways of communication together. On top of that, forums have a few advantages over IRC and mailing lists: - everybody knows how to use a forum, unlike IRC or mailing lists - messages posted to a forum are saved and searchable - forums are moderated - forums bring people in different timezones together - forums look more attractive; this may not be important to developers, but it is to users - our forum centralizes knowledge about many applications and platforms into 1 location The KDE Community Forums have no intention to replace IRC or mailing lists; we try to complement them. ----- Application specific forums. Not all development teams have enough resources to host and moderate their own forums, yet each development team needs to communicate with it's users. KDE Community Forums would like to offer development teams the opportunity to host application specific forums at forum.kde.org. There would be some conditions, of course: a member of your team, or someone appointed by your team, should be present regularly to answer questions our moderator team doesn't know the answer to, and so we can be sure the user feedback is actually heard by the development team. Also, your forum would have to generate some traffic, because we wouldn't want to end up with a forest of forums where nobody ever comes. Important note: since our forum can generate RSS and Atom feeds for each forum [2], send new threads to IRC channels [3], and even send notifications of new posts to a Jabber account [4], moderating a forum would, for the larger part, mean keeping an eye on your preferred communication medium. If you are a member of a KDE (related) development team, and you are interested in hosting a forum for your application, contact us at ad...@forum.kde.org. ----- Private, restricted forums. KDE Community Forums would like to offer you the opportunity to host your own private, restricted forums to be used by your team. These forums would be invisible and inaccessible to people who are not members of your team. This would give you as a team a central location to store reminders, to hold discussions you would like to save for the future, and to have discussions with members who are hard to reach, for example because they are in different timezones. If you are a member of a KDE (related) development team, and you are interested in hosting your private, restricted forums at KDE Community Forums, contact us at ad...@forum.kde.org. ----- Forum posts to IRC. Developers prefer to communicate on IRC; users prefer to communicate at forums. For this reason we developed a way to have new threads to specified (sub)forums at KDE Community Forums to be posted to specified IRC channels [3]. With this, a development/porting team can keep track of posts to our forum without having to visit KDE Community Forums. If you are a member of a KDE (related) develoment team, and you are interested in having new threads to one or more forums sent to an IRC channel, contact us at skrea...@forum.kde.org or join #kde-forum at irc.kde.org. ----- Forum posts to Jabber. JabberBot is a plugin for MyBB (the forum software) we developed to sent new posts to Jabber accounts [4]. If you are interested in having new posts to certain forums be sent to your Jabber account: - log in at forum.kde.org - click the link UserCP in the top-left of the page - in the menu, select 'Edit profile' - fill in your Jabber ID - hit the 'Save' button - in the menu, select 'Change settings' - check 'Enable Jabber notifications for subscriptions' - hit the 'Save' button - subscribe to the forums you wish to receive notifications about (there is a Subscribe link at the top of each thread listing) ----- If you have any other suggestions that may be of benefit to you and/or us, please contact us. Sincerely, The KDE Community Forums team [1] http://forum.kde.org [2] http://forum.kde.org/misc.php?action=syndication [3] http://forum.kde.org/skreamer-brings-forum-kde-org-to-irc-channels-t-29872.html [4] http://forum.kde.org/new-plugin-jabberbot-t-10106.html -- forum.kde.org Communicate. administrator team: ad...@forum.kde.org moderator team: m...@forum.kde.org IRC bot team: skrea...@forum.kde.org news suggestions: n...@forum.kde.org _______________________________________________ Plasma-devel mailing list Plasma-devel@kde.org https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/plasma-devel
