Sorry about the double post you will be getting Dirk-
Re: Christian's Einfeldt Post-
It a very good post about the politics and the changing ground surrounding the open source movement, on occasion. My personal belief is that a seperate, but helping, movement is best, much in the way that development on open source libraries by different people helps multiple projects, I am a believer that the same can be applied to getting information disseminated. That is why earlier I had mentioned wanting to see tie ins to individual project forums hosted on their own site. It prevents a duplication of the same questions on multiple different sites by allowing the one material to be seen by many.
Re: Google's representation of mailing lists and forums searches-
Ok what happens when I type in something that has been answered on, even this mailing list, into Google? I get one maybe two replies back on a search page to be honest, unless I am specifying this list in particular where I think in that case I get more. I get a link that says, show similar pages. In all honesty, I don't think I am alone in that if the summary of those two replies, or even the posts themselves more often than not, don't show information useful to what I am looking for, I keep looking through google search results.
To be honest more often than not, if I am googling something, I get more useful information from forums and to some extent wikis in Google's search results. Sure they may be great places to post up pictures of cats and cheesburgers, but they are also still decent places to get assistance as can be proven by Ubuntu Forums for example. I moderate one site that has a section on LInux in general(As well as their A/V editing sections and Apple sections). I post on another site that is specific to audio and has a linux section. I know others here do as well because I run into some of them on those sites. In both of those forums I have helped personally, lots of people get started in Linux, and have seen many more. They can certainly be used for troubleshooting and many people would prefer that than dealing with mailing lists, and especially mailing lists where their email is made public on most every post they make for mining algorithms to send tons of spam. I get several hundred spam messages a day to this email that I use for public postings right now, I can certianly understand that feeling. I also have decent filtering via gmail, and had Thunderbird doing it before that. I can't guarantee everyone does that. So yes I think there is something to be said still for forums in the troubleshooting process.
In as far as needing to sign up to search, that is something that depends on the site. Even so, so long as the site is publicly viewable, Google(And other search engines) will likely still index it, and thus it will turn up in search results there. When people are looking for a specific answer to a question, chances are they are going to google first, and thus get introduced to the forum like that. Also often times i have seen several people that after finding repeated answers in one spot, then join the forum to ask a question they couldn't find an answer to. Again I suggest joining a mailing list to them and they don't respond to favorably to it. To each their own, choice is at least as much a strength as it is a weakness in the open source world.
Seablade
_______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-audio-user
