On Sat, 2005-02-05 at 02:00 -1000, Warren Togami wrote: > Key to the problem is that mailing lists are far from the best medium > for end-user support. We need to steer end-users to an entirely > different medium in order to scale effectively. Official project change > in that direction is happening soon. Read the link above for details. > We have at least two problems: reduced participation and interest from developers, and the ability and interest to help USERS who, in their huge majority, do not have that "engineer" mentality nor any idea of how to use many other features of the Internet/Linux community that the veterans rely upon. Your solution ignores the users, particularly users who help others. A *very* important omission. I personally use a few web forums (particularly http://www.piperchat.com since I am an active pilot), and their usability, convenience, and scalability is severely limited. I have to go check to see if there are new messages, the web interface introduces needless delay, I *must* be online at the time I want to read messages (that's a biggie for many people)... there are a lot of objections. Remember that *quite a lot* of the support users get is from other users. I've been helping others on this and redhat lists since at least eight years ago... and I can tell you with 100% certainty, my participation and contribution WILL GO DOWN if we move to web fora. They are simply more difficult, more time-consuming, less convenient, and less flexible than mailing lists. That being said, I do also agree that Usenet solved this problem, and did it extraordinarily well, ages ago. Web fora are reinventions of that particular wheel, and we now have news-to-mail gateways, GUI news clients, web interfaces to NNTP... why make an inferior solution the primary one? Create a newsgroup hierarchy, set up a gateway to the web for those users who want/need it, and we're done. Ranking the three possible solutions by the functionality and benefits they can provide to this community as a whole, and attempting to include in my thought process developers, expert users, and newbies, I believe the winners are: 1. Usenet hierarchy 2. Mailing lists 3. Web fora I am always pleased and happy to see Red Hat's concern for its users, and I have never met (virtually, even) a Red Hat employee whom I didn't respect and like. That is a Great Thing [tm]. In this case, however, I vehemently disagree with your proposed solution. I think it's horrible and will significantly harm the interactions of this community. I thought this was going to be a brief note, but hey... just say "no" to web fora. Bad, bad idea. Cheers, -- Rodolfo J. Paiz <rpaiz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
