On Sat, 2006-04-22 at 17:30 +0200, Molle Bestefich wrote: > I'd like to know exactly what it is that people find so convenient about forums. A lot. If forums are made, they should be user, not developer, targeted. Normal users, as opposed to power hackers, prefer forums for a variety of reasons: 1. They can bookmark forum posts. 2. Webmail interfaces are very popular but often suck at threading mailing lists. 3. phpbb has become so widespread that signing up for a forum is something that they know how to do and are familiar with. 4. phpbb is so widespread that it's a familiar interface. 5. Subscribing to a mailing lists requires setting up filters so that you're main inbox isn't flooded with posts. 6. A forum has a throttleable amount of involvement. I don't want to have to subscribe to a mailing list to just ask one question and then probably never participate again, and then have to go through the whole sign up process again on the off chance that I do have another question. 7. Nobody whines when you attach large images or files. 8. It is easily searchable, and unlike the giant "wine-users" or "wine-devel" lists, you can narrow your search to specific subforums. 9. Posts that aren't active get filtered down to the bottom. Browsing the web interface to the mailing list just gives me a giant topic dump for the last month. 10. Sticky posts can alert users to the presence of the FAQ and answers to popular problems (like, click here for the WoW patch). Nobody on wine-devel should be concerned that they can't read a phpbb in mutt. Wine forums would be about centering users discussion in one place. I wouldn't expect the moderators to be actual wine developers, but people pulled from the community. The Ubuntu forums do this. The Ubuntu developers do not do much direct posting and everything works great. I wouldn't worry about communication between the lists and the forums at all. There is also a tendency for users that read both to arise and post important stuff back on the forums. For example, Stefan's ddraw->d3d patch would probably get immediately posted by someone, despite starting on the list. The community just takes it and runs with it. I think wine forums would get a lot more people running wine succesfully. Right now if you want to run World of Warcraft on wine, you need to hunt down a specific popular thread on gentoo.org. It'd be a lot easier for all wine users if they could just go to one place. Doing all the work to improve the mailing list web interface seems like a bad idea when you can just spare yourself all the work and use something like phpbb. Why reinvent the wheel? _______________________________________________ wine-users mailing list wine-users@xxxxxxxxxx http://www.winehq.org/mailman/listinfo/wine-users
