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 decide tocreate 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.
I agree with Austin. Mailing lists are faster and come with less bloat and wasted time waiting for icons to load. I'm assuming most people use an e-mail client like Thunderbird or evolution. What do we have to gain with a forum? The biggest loss with a forum would be more stress and dependence on the server....besides, mailing lists are the standard for this sort of thing.