Solution Coming Re: Fedora Community: Under threat?

[Rodolfo J. Paiz]

On Sat, 2005-02-05 at 02:00 -1000, Warren Togami wrote:
> Key to the problem is that mailing lists are far from the best medium 
> for end-user support.  We need to steer end-users to an entirely 
> different medium in order to scale effectively.  Official project change 
> in that direction is happening soon.  Read the link above for details.
> 

We have at least two problems: reduced participation and interest from
developers, and the ability and interest to help USERS who, in their
huge majority, do not have that "engineer" mentality nor any idea of how
to use many other features of the Internet/Linux community that the
veterans rely upon.

Your solution ignores the users, particularly users who help others. A
*very* important omission.

I personally use a few web forums (particularly http://www.piperchat.com
since I am an active pilot), and their usability, convenience, and
scalability is severely limited. I have to go check to see if there are
new messages, the web interface introduces needless delay, I *must* be
online at the time I want to read messages (that's a biggie for many
people)... there are a lot of objections.

Remember that *quite a lot* of the support users get is from other
users. I've been helping others on this and redhat lists since at least
eight years ago... and I can tell you with 100% certainty, my
participation and contribution WILL GO DOWN if we move to web fora. They
are simply more difficult, more time-consuming, less convenient, and
less flexible than mailing lists.

That being said, I do also agree that Usenet solved this problem, and
did it extraordinarily well, ages ago. Web fora are reinventions of that
particular wheel, and we now have news-to-mail gateways, GUI news
clients, web interfaces to NNTP... why make an inferior solution the
primary one? Create a newsgroup hierarchy, set up a gateway to the web
for those users who want/need it, and we're done.

Ranking the three possible solutions by the functionality and benefits
they can provide to this community as a whole, and attempting to include
in my thought process developers, expert users, and newbies, I believe
the winners are:

	1. Usenet hierarchy
	2. Mailing lists
	3. Web fora

I am always pleased and happy to see Red Hat's concern for its users,
and I have never met (virtually, even) a Red Hat employee whom I didn't
respect and like. That is a Great Thing [tm]. In this case, however, I
vehemently disagree with your proposed solution. I think it's horrible
and will significantly harm the interactions of this community.

I thought this was going to be a brief note, but hey... just say "no" to
web fora. Bad, bad idea.

Cheers,

-- 
Rodolfo J. Paiz <rpaiz at simpaticus.com>