Re: [tdf-discuss] [Forum]How will the forum be organized?

Hy, Drew! Sorry for the delay, I was not on town yesterday and there
was a lot to read today ;)
On one hand, I see resource splitting (and a new forum imply that
resources will split: you cannot be on all places at the same time) as
a problem, because it is a synonym of duplicated efforts. But on the
other hand the splitting on the OOo forums came because there was no
"official" support channel outside mailing lists and it was not
possible to agree with a view on how to manage the forum with Ed.
And (third hand?) a lot of people do not like mailing lists: they are
chaotic, difficult to search with lots of duplicated threads.(1)
And no, I don't think nabble solve those problems: nabble make mailing
lists handling a bit easier, adding the possibility of
cross-referencing, but it is far from being a real forum.
For now we are OK with the existing forums, but on the long run it
seems LibO will diverge from OOo quite a lot. Even if some of us could
be crazy enough to have several packages running on parallel (LibO,
OOo, development versions...) and be aware of the growing differences,
soon or later the people helping on the forums will be hit by real
life and will need to do a choice sticking with one solution: under
that situation will not be realistic to have only one structure for
all the variants.
When this time arrive and LibO will be different enough from OOo,
maybe it will be too late to start a LibO own solution, as it was a
bit late when the OOo community forums started.
To grow healthy, LibO needs to communicate with their users on all
possible channels and a user forum is one of the most important ones.
But this communication must be between the project and its users, not
between the users and some third party group.
But if an official forum starts, I think LibO must be, first of all,
honest with itself and with the people interested and recognize its
inheritance: a section of it should be devoted to link to existing
resources where there are lots of user guides and good threads
available that are still valid. Only when the differences grow enough,
those links should be replaced by local content.
Just my 2¢

Ricardo

(1) Before someone start arguing that forums have the same problems (I
read that many times from people who prefer mailing lists), that's not
true: maybe some moderators could have that problem, but never the
forums by itself when considered as a tool. The OOo community forums
are a really good example: they are very clean and well organized
because moderators move, merge, split, cross reference and even remove
threads all the time. And on a phpBB forum that "house cleaning" is
really easy to perform: you only need dedicated people and we have
lots of dedicated people ;)

2011/1/10 drew <drew@baseanswers.com>:
> Howdy Ricardo,
>
> May I just ask first, before responding to others. You where part of the
> discussion on the user services forum, I think, at least I am pretty
> sure you would have read the last discussion in the admin area.
>
> So - do you think we should have a LibreOffice web forum?
>
> Thanks
>
> Drew

-- 
Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to discuss+help@documentfoundation.org
Archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/discuss/
*** All posts to this list are publicly archived for eternity ***