On 8/16/06, Michael Phipps <mphipps1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
To me, the best of both worlds would be a forum/mailing list hybrid, sort of like gmane but better, wherein you could login and post and read, but optionally tie that to a mailing list so you could work from email if you would prefer that. I haven't seen anything that will do that today. Mailman is 1/2 way there. Most of the forums are 1/2 way there.
May I remind you of Google Groups which to *exactly* what we want? Unfortunately, when I suggested to move our public development lists over to Google the response I got was "why do we need this?". It was pretty clear why we need this: * it supports push (mailing list) and pull (forum) * you can post directly from the web interface or via email (whatever you prefer) * you can mark individual topics as important from within the web interface * you can watch individual *topics* (receive emails) if you don't want to watch the whole *group* * all groups are in one single place * you only need one Google account to subscribe to all groups (easier to manage) * the Groups interface is much easier and looks better than the Mailman interface
The disadvantages would be: * we lose the current email archives * the lists aren't hosted at haiku-os.org * everyone would have to switch to Google (this can be a slow transition because all new messages could be shared between freelists.org and Google)
We don't need an official site and a wiki and forums and mailing lists. The question is, what do you cut? I tend toward cutting the wiki and the
I'd even like to close the wiki. I'm still unsure about our forums: Should they be integrated into our website or should they stay separate (phpBB)? I don't really like the fact that people searching for content on our website will also get forum articles in their results. From what I've seen, the forums are mostly used for silly discussions. There are a few interesting discussions, but IMHO those should move to the official mailing list, so everyone can participate.
What do you think about only having a "Support" forum? Any posts which are not support requests (or which don't contain important information) will be deleted. The current phpBB forums would have to move away from our server, so it's clear that they aren't official and new developers should always use the mailing lists (some developers used our forums, instead).
I would also like to self-host all of our mailing lists. Our hosting solution makes this easy, we just have to decide to do it as part of the new site. This is not a criticism of any of our hosting for our mailing lists, but I think that it would be more professional looking, to say the least. Especially since we have changed our name... :-)
Self-hosting sounds nice, but Google looks a lot better functioality-wise (IMHO...).
Bye, Waldemar Kornewald
