[Mageia-discuss] Mailing List to Web Forum Bidirectional Gateway

[Tux99]

Quote: maat-ml wrote on Mon, 04 October 2010 09:42
 
> ... provided that setting up such a bridge does not push developers
> and
> packagers to retreat to (future) Cauldron list or to ruletrash emails
> coming from the bridge (or even to switch to another distro with less
> draconian rules) :-/
> 
> You can not force people to communicate without their assent :)

Maat this is unrational fear, that probably originates from the Mandriva
past. You cannot run a pure community distro like a distro run by a
commercial company, where paid developers (with the help of volunteer
devs) do their job and then throw it out there for the 'wild hordes' to
consume.

A commercial distro attracts the kind of users who just want to be served a
good product and if they are not happy about it they come complain.
I perfectly understand why devs want to hide from those kinds of users.

But a pure community distro attracts a different kind of user, users of
community distros know they are not owed anything, that they are "in debt"
with the devs and therefore the users behave differently. You can see that
if you look at other pure community FOSS projects.

If the official forums has clear rules and well organised subforums as I'm
sure it will be, then users won't invade the ML (or the ML gw forums)
simply because the rules will say that the dev ML is for developer talk
only, while support questions need to go into the support subforums.

Of course there will always be the odd user that misbehaves, but there will
also be mods who will educate and worst case restrict users that don't
behave.
The main point though is, when the users is aware that all the devs are
volunteers, then there is a lot more respect for them.

XBMC is for example a FOSS project that has the developer subforums on the
main user forum and from my experience this is respected by the users.
see here: http://forum.xbmc.org/

-- 
(post sent from the Mageia ML Gateway Test Forum)