Ned Slider wrote:
On 12/15/2009 01:52 PM, Les Mikesell wrote:
Karanbir Singh wrote:
Recommendations:
- phpbb
- Draw up a list of recommendations / guideline for the moderators
- let the languages be independant in their own space ( eg.
forums.centos.org/<lang> )
I'd much rather see the effort go into better handling of the mail list archives with a searchable web interface instead of splitting the knowledge base and making it take much more work to find and answer questions.
IMHO it's about offering choice in available help channels, be that mailing list, IRC, Wiki or forums, and making sure that each is as good as it can be.
Those are conflicting goals since the more you divide a finite set of resources the less any part can have.
This particular discussion is about the forums, how we can make them as good as they can be, and how we can best integrate them into a coherent community based support strategy for CentOS under the current remit of Website Version 2.
Integration might make sense, but I haven't seen a great way to tie the conversations to a mail list.
How much work is it to head on over to the forums and answer questions as they get asked?
Too much for me. If you have more than a few interests you'd spend all your time bouncing between different locations.
I don't see how that is "much more work" than answering questions by email - it's just using a different application, a web browser, instead of an email client. If you use webmail you could even use the same application for both :-/
I have a mail application open anyway - there's no 'more work' involved whether there are new messages there or not - they just show up and the ones I've read are automatically tracked. Even if I have a browser open it's not going to be showing forums for all my interests at once and then I'd have to deal with a different login and interface to answer each one. There's some potential for rss aggregation, but most I've seen don't track 'new' messages on a personal level.
Integrated search is already available, just that atm it only covers website, wiki and forums (not mailing lists). In fact if some mailing list participants used it occasionally we wouldn't get the same old threads constantly regurgitating content that is already expertly covered on the Wiki in FAQ or HowTo format. People have spent an enormous amount of time and effort producing such content and it very rarely gets linked from the mailing list.
That's pretty much what I'd expect when you split people and content into incompatible areas.
Anyway, feel free to write a plugin for the Website version 2 to allow integrated searching of website, wiki, forums *and* mailing list as I'm sure KB would be most grateful :)
If that were possible, someone would probably have done it already. Some of the lists I'm on have forum integration but it regularly causes trouble with conversation threading and posts from people who never return to share their experience.