[Mageia-dev] Release cycles proposals, and discussion - messages from the forum

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Lee Forest at 14/06/11 13:52 did gyre and gimble:
> mailing list might work best for a couple people but is it worth
> inconveniencing the rest of the word because you are a die hard mailing
> list user

I've posted the arguments before and I'll do it again, despite this
thread going dangerously off topic.

I find the use of forums to be a great drawback to project engagement as
an upstream developer. I have to read communities from several updateam
projects and I get as annoyed about forums as I do about people posting
in HTML on mailing lists.

Forums are disjoint and individually styled. When you are jumping from
one project to another to get through your daily grind of information,
it is exceptionally annoying to have to adjust your eyes and the way you
operate to cope with the styles, features, login system etc. of each
individual forums (forii, forum?).

I want the information from these 30 or so projects I'm involved in to
be available to me in one place, not have a series of inconvenient
bookmarks and a procedure of checking one, then the next then the one
after that until I've done the rounds (and of course repeating that
procedure throughout the day if I want to see any new topics!). It's
much less time consuming to have a single UI and central store of
information in which I can look.

Perhaps if all the forums could be aggregated into one handy feed per
project and stripped of all their styling I could agree, but then that
would just be reinventing mailing lists!

It's all too easy to get lured by the guise of a forum-based system when
you only follow a couple of projects, but please consider those of us
who have several projects to follow.



As for the server traffic argument, this is what NNTP is for and GMane
does an excellent service of collecting and aggregating mailing list
from most open source projects. When you look at the size of their feeds
you'll realise just how many projects are run on mailing lists.


Just like IRC, the fresh faced and full of wonder souls (not to mention
many other types of souls too, I'm just picking on one demographic that
suggests it more often than others!) often comment about how some more
"modern" system is more appropriate for interaction. I don't dispute the
lower barrier of entry for forums, and they can be a good way to engage
with a less technical audience, but I will never be able to get involved
in them (except when people specifically ask me to comment on topics) as
it's just far too much of an intrusion in my daily grind.


Build a nice forum to mail gateway (and vice versa) and it would likely
please everyone. Technology can solve this!

I won't comment again on this topic (at least on this thread!).

Col




-- 

Colin Guthrie
mageia(at)colin.guthr.ie
http://colin.guthr.ie/

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