Solution Coming Re: Fedora Community: Under threat?

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Feb  6, 2005, Gain Paolo Mureddu <gmureddu at prodigy.net.mx> wrote:

> [I] have never had any trouble with say V-Bulletin (yeah, I know
> their fame) message boards, even on some servers with as high
> traffic as our list here. I guess it's up to the site admins to set
> a good set of options for archiving and a good search tool (with an
> *SQL backend most probably) to make it easy for the users to find
> what they're looking for.

If the main issue is to enable users to find answers to questions that
have been answered before, a good search engine in the mailing list
archives would be fine.

But people willing to help can't easily keep track of new questions
yet to be answered, how are we ever going to create the good,
searchable archive of answered questions?

Web forums are just too time-consuming if you want to have the choice
of keeping up with everything that is discussed in a forum.
Downloading the entire forum in background and then skimming through
the threads and reading whatever looks interesting without having to
wait a few seconds to download the contents of whatever
topic/thread/message you choose to read, is far more efficient than
clicking on a topic/thread/message, waiting a few seconds until it's
displayed and then reading its contents in just as many seconds.


Warren's posting focuses on part of the problem, namely, that of
creating a good environment for people to find help with problems they
run into.  I believe a good searchable web front-end to any forum (be
it e-mail, news or your typical web forum) could accomplish just that.

The other important part of the problem is to help people willing to
help answer questions.  I doubt any web forum interface would enable
people willing to help to do so efficiently and effectively, and
without those answers, the web forum would be just a board on which
people would post questions and not get answers.  In order to be
efficient for the helpers, a web forum would have to have a gateway to
e-mail and/or news, so as to enable helpers to remove the latency of
web interactions, and let them (err, us? :-) organize the information
that is most suitable to them.  And if there's a gateway to e-mail
and/or news, e-mail and/or news might as well be a first-class entry
point to the forum, just as much as the corresponding web forum.

Web forums just force you into a specific form to display and access
information.  They're intrinsically against the principles behind Free
Software, that are meant to enable you to modify the software in
whatever way suits you best.  Web forums that offer the information in
forms meant for other programs to handle, in the form of web services,
XML-RPC, whatever, will let you do that, but they require people to
reinvent wheels not only on the server side, but also on client sides,
because good, threaded mail/news reading programs are unlikely to
support such custom web forum protocols.  I.e., you lose no matter how
you look at web forums.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva             http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist  oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}