Forum

cezaryece
now I am thinking we need forum.

if we can made forum conected with mailing list it will be great

I think forum is better than mailing list because of archiving threads and google indexing - forum can be better than FAQ in fact - it is automatically generated FAQ by google index

we still answering same questions on IRC and mailing list - it is because there are not any answers in the web (even in wiki, where you must manually duplicate informations from here or from mailing list)

from my experience people would not like to joining mailing list, would not like to connect to IRC - whey would like to ask google and get answer from it

IRC and mailing list are very old-school method of connecting with users, in this time very archaic

vox_: yes, but I cant find any IRC or mailing list users (I mean any, not realted with Scribus) from my friends they all use windows and IRC or mailing list is something... exotic

and do you know why? because IRC and mailing list needs your activity forum indexed by google is what they expect and what is good enough they ask google and got answer

malex 23:42, 23 January 2011 (CET) Wiki is also indexed by Google. If we put our efforts into organizing the wiki and transferring the bits of knowledge discussed on the mailing list and IRC to it it will only become stronger. Forums are also notorious security holes. It might turn into a support and security nightmare pretty fast.

insanekane
somehow i find forums to be pretty irritating. they start out OK, but then all the topics end up something like "I need help", "please help me" and what not

ale
i thought about the forum topic... and as you correctly pointed, it's indeed easier for "outsiders" to use forums...

but, on the other side, i looks to me somehow evident that for "power contributors" email is really much more practical

i'm wondering: would it be possible to have a mixed interface (a mailing list which can be viewed as a forum)?

no idea if one already exists...

probably not easy to manage, because many people use crappy mail program which don't respect most conventions on headers...

the easy part is to allow people to post from the forum to the mailing list.

the hard part, afaict, is to classify the mails from the mailing list into the forum.

personally, i can't think of myself posting into a forum when i'm busy.

but, well, personally, i mostly don't like how forums are split in sections... most of the time those sections don't match what i want to do or i'm looking for...

so: a proposal from me: a forum with few categories and each category is a mailing list (except "done with scribus"... i guess :-)

and the forum classifies the mails from the ML by reading the subject

and now the question: is there any software doing it?

one further problem, is how to allow "anonymous" posting to a mailing list but avoid crap mails (in a pure forum you can delete them, on a mailing list, once their sent, they're sent)

(ok, we could have 10 people getting the mails from the forum and if one of them accepts it it goes through) fazit: in my eyes a forum interface would be a positive thing, but i'm not sure that you can get the programmers and the main ML contributors to switch to a forum.

malex 23:36, 23 January 2011 (CET) This is probably the biggest problem. Spam will overwhelm any forum unless there are hordes of moderators keeping a vigil over it. I don't know anyone in the Scribus community who has the time and will to do that.

ale we should also first ask ourselves if we a/ want to communicate with people who can't manage to get into a ML b/ can manage more people (mostly beginners) getting in touch with us.

how to manage the spam (i guess that it will mostly come from the forum side). something like: post from forum users with no karma only reach the ML after having been reviewed by a human...

i'm for getting all the mails from the ML into one single category and have as few categories as possible (basically: two matching the existing ML, plus one with "success stories")... i hate having to wonder in which category i have to look for or post... but, i'm not a forum fanatic....

we should get a heavy forum user into the boat to check that we are doing works well on the forum side... we are all ML geeks...

mizmo
http://mairin.wordpress.com/2010/03/16/a-rich-web-interface-for-mailing-lists/

well i did one thing with it. i used drupal to turn the fedora design list into both a forum & a 'blog' and you could make a post from the mailing list, forum, or blog and everyone using each could see it

but im no drupal expert and it was overrun with span soon enough so i shut it down

it is important though that someone could use the ML and not ever know or be bothered by the web interfaces to it

FUDforum
"FUDforum includes tools which will allow the forum to be used to archive newsgroups (NNTP) and mailing lists. In addition, FUDforum allows the administrator to permit forum members to post messages back to a mailing list or a newsgroup. This feature makes FUDforum an ideal access point to newsgroups and mailing lists for those who cannot access those resources directly. "

malex 23:45, 23 January 2011 (CET) YAPB (Yet Another PHP BB). These forums are not as useful as they sound. Information there gets old, it's difficult for the hypothetical new users discussed on this page to figure out which discussions are still relevant and such. I think we need to keep the wiki humming along, which will take care of the above problems.

groupserver
http://groupserver.org/

malex 23:29, 23 January 2011 (CET) That looks like yapb (Yet Another PHP Board) project. What would we gain by switching  to it from the mailing lists?

avox 00:12, 24 January 2011 (CET) Not quite, it's a web interface to ML. The idea is to have both.

malex 03:55, 24 January 2011 (CET) Avox, it's a different ML then mailman with unknown track record and setup/maintenance problems. Also, we'd loose the archives we already have.

Extension:DiscussionThreading
malex 23:40, 23 January 2011 (CET)

MediaWiki Discussion Threading Extension could be of help. I believe that we need to keep things centered on the wiki, so if we could add a question asking area it could be threaded for a discussion to develop that then can be turned into a wiki article when consensus emerges.

Mailing List -> Wiki
malex 23:40, 23 January 2011 (CET)

Alternatively, people could keep an eye on the mailing list and write short articles that would summarize the discussions taking place there. There is only a limited number of topics being discussed, so transferring the information to the wiki would make it the best go-to place. Google will index the wiki, so users can find the articles.