Re: forums.postgresql.com.au

On 6 April 2011 13:15, Andrew Sullivan <ajs(at)crankycanuck(dot)ca> wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 06, 2011 at 10:08:15PM +1000, Elliot Chance wrote:
>> Hi Everyone,
>>
>> It has been a long time since this was brought up. It's time.
>>
>> Any important concerns should be discussed at (to keep everyone looking at the same place):
>> http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Forums_at_postgresql.com.au
>>
>> But also keep general discussion on the mailing list.
>
> Having looked at that very briefly, there seems to be no consideration
> that this was all done once before, for Usenet.  Has anyone looked at
> how those issues were resolved there?  (FWIW, my impression was
> "mostly, they weren't".  I have pretty serious doubts you're going to
> do better.  Why do these two completely different styles of
> interaction need to be merged anyway?  I think adding forum traffic to
> the mailing list will be yet another way to make the lists less
> useful.)

It introduces another point of entry to the community. There will be
people who are averse to mailing lists, and find forums more familiar
and accessible. Adding more traffic means more users involved in the
community. Not sure why this makes the lists less useful.

These aren't completely different styles of interaction either. It's
good form on our mailing list to bottom-post, which happens to be the
style on forums.

There are issues to be resolved before it could be accepted, such as
forcing plain text, maintaining conversations, importing existing
mailing list archives in and not introducing any loopholes for
spammers to abuse.

The alternative is to have a completely independant forum, which is
probably destined to fail as it has several times in the past,
especially since the core developers and main contributors exclusively
use the mailing list. At least this way they can be brought into a
forum transparently.

--
Thom Brown
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IRC (freenode): dark_ixion
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