On Mar 8, 2011, at 3:04 PM, Sergiu Dumitriu wrote: > On 03/08/2011 07:45 AM, Vincent Massol wrote: >> Hi Andreas, >> >> On Mar 7, 2011, at 11:13 PM, Andreas Hahn wrote: >> >>> Hi everyone, >>> >>> I'd like to make the proposal to drop the existing mailing lists in >>> favor of a forum (bulletin board) software. >>> >>> The objective is to promote the XWiki community discussions to a broader >>> audience. >>> >>> 1) A forum serves like an advertising window as anyone can read the >>> contributions without subscription. >> >> You don't need any subscription to read mailing lists. >> See http://xwiki.markmail.org/ >> >>> 2) Anyone can judge the activity by reading the view count. >> >> Same here: >> http://xwiki.markmail.org/ >> >>> 3) New users can get in touch with the community without being urged to >>> subscribe to a mailing list. >> >> How? Even with forums you need to subscribe. >> >>> 4) Many people consider mailing lists as spam and prefer not to subscribe >>> 5) Contributions have a longer visibility and older entries will get >>> responses >> >>> 6) Communication gets more efficient as the same topics won't get >>> repeatedly discussed >> >>> 7) To my experience forums get much better indexed by google as mail >>> collectors like Nabble , Markmail, e.t.c. >>> 8) Forums encourage user to user discussions and you will see new users >>> taking an active role >>> 9) There should be at least one additional category IMHO: administrators >>> 10) A forum is more pleasure to read once a topic split into many threads >>> 11) A forum is beneficial when expecting increasing support requirements >>> - some real large scale forums were run by just a few moderators >>> 12) More people will see what a teriffic job the XWiki team does. >>> >>> Here's my +1 >> >> I have some good news for you: we already have a forum! :) >> >> See http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Community/MailingLists >> And more specifically: >> http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Community/Forum >> >> Now if this forum doesn't fit your needs could you explain what requirements >> you'd have for a forum and which solution you'd pick? >> I personally liked jive forums but it doesn't exist anymore (it's folded >> into a full collaboration suite now). >> >> Thanks >> -Vincent > > This was thoroughly discussed four years ago, and the conclusion was > against installing a specific forum, and stick with Nabble as a > forum-like view of the mailing list activity: > http://markmail.org/thread/gbdnyb7jbh4ha5ja
Right I had forgotten about this discussion :) I do remember another one though (earlier than the one you pointed) where I was the one wanting a forum as a way to get more participation. What I'd really like to have that we don't currently have is a way to more visibly see who's participating more and thus encourage participation. A lot of forum do this by giving points to people who answer questions, then they get a title and a badge based on these points. Then you can list the top contributors. That said, thanks to markmail, I think our mailing lists have become a lot more browsable than before and we even get statistics: http://xwiki.markmail.org/search/?q= At some point in the past I looked at jive because it has this point system and it had the feature to be integrated on top of a mailing list. But since it disappeared I haven't found any other good option that would allow us to keep the list too. Now we have a real open question as to whether we want to keep our list AND create a getstatisfaction project for XWiki too (getsatisfaction or another similar tool). So far we've resisted doing this because it means scattering our support and thus reducing the support quality level (we cannot monitor several places easily). There are some guys who post and ask questions about xwiki on developez.com for example (see http://tinyurl.com/4ftdyly) but since we don't answer there I believe people either think xwiki is not well supported or they find their way to the official support location. One one hand I'd love to use a tool such as getsatisfaction, OTOH I don't know how we can manage properly both our lists + getsatisfaction. One solution would be to remove the user list and only keep the devs list and move users to getsatisfaction but I'm not sure how good or bad that would be. Anyone having any thoughts on this? Thanks -Vincent _______________________________________________ users mailing list users@xwiki.org http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/users
