Hello, we at Gradleware have been exploring different technologies and approaches that we could put in place to help members of the Gradle community ask questions, raise problems and share ideas.
Until now, our user mailing list has been the primary channel for this kind of thing. While this has worked reasonably well we feel that the Gradle community deserves better, so we went looking for alternatives. We wanted a system that: - Makes it incredibly easy for people to join and participate (as much or as little as they want) - Allows people to find, focus on and participate in topics relevant to them (and not to be bombarded with noise about topics they aren't) - Allows editing, tagging and threaded replies. This is essential for using it as a high quality knowledge database. - Allows better community participation (e.g. voting) - Allows for a better quality of service (e.g. make it easy to find all unanswered topics) - Supports basic formatting, including syntax highlighting - Allows “canonical” answers to questions to be highlighted out of all the replies to a question/topic (for easy finding) - Provides RSS feeds and email - Allows community champions/experts to be recognized. After evaluating several different options, we found that GetSatisfaction provided the best platform and we think it will serve the Gradle community the best. We would like to get your opinion and feedback on this endeavour and solicit your help to kickstart this new initiative that we are calling the “Gradle Forums”. You can create your account and log in to the forums right now @ http://forums.gradle.org/ We are still in the process of applying some customizations to the site and exploring it ourselves. Please feel free to log in and post questions, share ideas, report problems and do anything else that you can on the forums. Content can either be real (e.g. real problems you encounter) or just made up stuff for the sake of playing with the site. Before launching to the whole community we'll go through and remove any “play” content. While we at Gradleware are confident in this new forum, we are still evaluating and we really need your feedback and opinions to ensure that this is going to work well for the Gradle community. We hope that the Gradle Forums will replace the mailing list very soon as the main community discussion and support mechanism. If you have any questions/suggestions/feedback about the new forums, or the initiative in general, please use the new forums site to post it. We'll be watching, and it will be a good way to get a feel for it. Of course an email is also appreciated. Thanks for being part of the initiative. Hans -- Hans Dockter Founder, Gradle http://www.gradle.org, http://twitter.com/gradleware CEO, Gradleware - Gradle Training, Support, Consulting http://www.gradleware.com
