Re: [tdf-discuss] LibreOfficeForum.org is now functioning

Hello again to everyone,

Thanks very much for your comments and suggestions! Sorry I haven't
replied until now, I've been unable to reply due to a widespread internet
outage where I live. Good thing I'm not self-hosting this thing.  ;-)

So, I'll try to comment on a few of the issues that have been mentioned so
far...

I understand that a forum may be set up some day under the LibreOffice.org
domain. At any rate, maybe this current initiative will save them some
effort later on. And for now, I think we do need an easier way to
communicate, I personally dislike mailing lists as many of you do. The
entry point for a web forum is much lower, especially for beginners who
just want to ask a one-off question without having their email flooded
with unrelated messages forever after. Both methods tend to be vulnerable
to spam, but forum spam is easier to moderate and prevent, in my opinion.

As for multi-language, I'm willing to set it up for any language that has
enough users to benefit from it. I think this can easily be accomplished.
LibreOfficeForum.org is running on Drupal, on which I have several years
of experience. Drupal is, in my opinion, the premiere platform for
multi-language, high-traffic sites. I think the best way to accomplish
this would be to setup LibreOfficeForum.org as  a launch page with links
to different language subdomains such as en.libreofficeforum.org ,
es.libreofficeforum.org , de.libreofficeforum.org etc. Does this sound
good to you? And it should be possible to use the same login (one common
database) for all the forums. Drupal also supports openID authentication.
I just now enabled it on LibreOfficeForum.org, although I need to educate
myself more about usage and implementation of it.

The security of Drupal combined with the security permissions of my
current host (DownTownHost) has given me 0 problems so far. Previously
when I had a site with Joomla + SMF + Midphase hosting, I had all sorts of
hacking problems. But other sites I have with Drupal + DownTownHost have
been bulletproof so far; I've truly been impressed. The host also offers
tiered bandwidth pricing as needed. I could always upgrade it to handle
the load. I have two unobtrusive text-only Adsense blocks on the site,
which should cover the hosting costs and make it sustainable for the long
term. Users can easily get rid of them if they want to with an ad blocker.
Or I could even add a user profile option for the user to disable Adsense
if he really hates it. Does this sound like a reasonable option?

Another thing that we'll need are moderators. I know that we have sort of
a chicken-and-egg situation, not many post because not many people post,
and therefore not many people post. :-) But I'm sure we'll be rolling
within a few weeks. I've already had a few volunteers for English and
Spanish- many thanks to them- and I'll work on getting them set up soon.
Any others moderator volunteers for other languages as well? I'll also
need help to know if the site language interface modules are properly
translated, and I'll need help to translate the forum categories into
other languages besides English and Spanish.

Thanks again to LibreOffice for their initiative with this project, and
thanks to all the friendly volunteers here on this mailing list.

Take care, have fun!

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