Solution Coming Re: Fedora Community: Under threat?

[D. D. Brierton]

On Sat, 2005-02-05 at 02:00 -1000, Warren Togami wrote:

> Totally in agreement, please read my post on this subject here.
> 
> http://www.livejournal.com/users/wtogami/2005/02/04/

Warren, thanks for posting here. Funnily enough I'd already read the
above on your blog (via the Fedora People planet), and was planning on
posting something to this list about it.

Obviously, you know that I agree with you about what the problems are.
(I wrote original post you replied to.) But I don't know that I agree
with your proposed solution. I personally find web forums (e.g. the
nvidia linux forum) totally unusable -- I can never find anything on
them, I find them hard to navigate, etc. Also, you are effectively
ghettoising end users (and we're not all clueless newbies, you know)
from the developers, and I'm not sure that's a good thing. I think that
what we need is a greater effort on the part of us, the community, to
enforce good behaviour, so that the developers might eventually feel
that they might actually come back to the more general purpose lists.

Having said that, it may turn out that you have the most kick-arse web
forum software in mind that would allay my doubts. Personally I find
mailing lists to be quite clunky, even with a good mail reader like
Evolution with filtering and threading. I never understood why open
source projects have such a penchant for mailing lists, when clearly
that isn't really what email was designed for and is what usenet/NNTP is
designed for. Especially given that you can set up a newsserver which
requires a username and password to access it, and which can be set to
only carry local groups and retain the messages forever (which would
solve many of the problems involved with searching the lists as well).

Anyway, I'm all for thinking of ways to improve how we as a community
communicate with each other. But I'm sceptical that web forums are the
way forward.

Best, Darren

-- 
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D. D. Brierton            darren at dzr-web.com          www.dzr-web.com
       Trying is the first step towards failure (Homer Simpson)
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