On Tuesday February 19 2008 03:11:24 Austin English wrote:
On Feb 18, 2008 8:53 PM, Christopher Harvey arbuckle911@gmail.com wrote:
L. Rahyen wrote:
On Monday February 18 2008 19:44:08 Austin English wrote:
On Feb 18, 2008 12:35 PM, L. Rahyen research@science.su wrote:
Of course, there is some people who like forums. If we decideto create forum specifically for them, it is important to have possibility to subscribe for receiving all (full) messages from the forum to e-mail with direct link to reply page for corresponding message, and ability to login permanently without stupid timeout (using cookies). In fact there is some forums like this (unfortunately, all of them are unrelated to WINE) and they are pretty usable (however, personally I like mailing lists more, and didn't used forums for a long time). Of course, if there is no volunteer(s) to create and support such forum - then wine-users is enough I think.
In my experience, the 'older' crowd prefers newsgroups, but 'younger' people prefer message boards. Similar to how more advanced users prefer CLI, but inexperienced/novices use GUI. It seems to me we're trying to help the gui type of person, and a message board would be an easier way to do this, IMHO.
Then what exactly we want? It is useful to decide what we need.For example, phpBB forum with certain mods/modifications to give functionality I mentioned. If we agree with this (or decide to choose something else), then we can discuss next details, etc. In fact, if we decide to create phpBB forum, I can help here. I have programming experience with this in the past, and I can create ready-for-use forum if we decide we need this (of course I can make also its design, etc.). Also, I can give hosting on my server. But first, we should make decision what we need. If above offer is acceptable, then design details can be discussed farther. If not then what is acceptable.
Why not make a forum and then have winehq link to it? If it becomes popular maybe it'll become the official one. That's the spirit of the GPL, the way I see it, don't need popular support or permission.
If everyone seems happy the way wine-forum.org is organized, we could simply add a link on winehq. That way we don't add another forum to the mix, and also have one area that can gather users of wine with winehq's blessing.
What I want to say is to wait 1-2 months and see what will change in wine-forum after this discussion. If major issues will not be fixed after this time then I think creating the forum from scratch is better just because I already have heavily modified and improved source code of phpBB forum (but it is somewhat old; however, updating to new version should be not very hard task) - so in my case much less programming is needed at the start. If I decide to create the forum in next few weeks, then let another 2-3 months to pass... After this it should be possible to make elaborated decisions. There is no need for rush in this case I think. Also Christopher Harvey is right, maybe it is better to create the forum first and only after this + 2-4 months waiting discuss this topic again. Then comparison with other forums will be possible in order to pick the best. But as I said, I want to wait at least 3-4 weeks to see if wine-forum.org will start to improve or not... If not I probably will try to create something better.