Neal Becker Software Package..?

[jdow]

On 2012/01/07 15:24, Joe Zeff wrote:
> On 01/07/2012 02:01 PM, jdow wrote:
>>
>> Seriously, Joe, you miss his point. Forget the login straw man. That is not
>> the issue. The issue is the clumsy navigation to get to 20 different fora
>> and then to each new thread you are interested in, which few forums
>> remember
>> for you.
>
> As I may have written before, I've never found web fora to be the slightest bit
> clumsy, unless whoever set it up went out of their way to make it so. In fact, I
> rather enjoy going to a support forum and browsing through the various boards
> looking for threads I might find interesting. If you don't like them, don't use
> them, but there are enough people using them, IMAO, to prove that they're not
> useless for everybody. And, the main reason I made a point out of the login
> issue was to show that it wasn't true for most people, eliminating it, I hoped,
> from the list of reasons to avoid them.

Some fora are very nice for that once in a while browsing activity. Most are
dreadful, like the Mozilla fora structure. You often can easily find a dozen
people asking the same question and no answers. The Avira forums are support
for the manufacturer and are heavily monitored by people who know what they
are doing. Finding answers there is not a bad experience. Mailing lists are
often murder in that regard. If you want to follow the buzz, as I do for many
mailing lists, the mailing list approach is far better in that it requires
less "page loading delay" than a forum does. Mailing lists also tend to pull
in more peer to peer help than you might find in fora. More people at least
read the questions.

This is why I think a hybrid approach would be good. The mailing list
archives for this group could get organized more as a forum and benefit
greatly, I suspect. It would require a team of moderators to group message
topics in a multiple-hierarchical structure by type of problem and the portion
of the distribution's contents that are affected. (A given bug might fall
under selinux and samba, for example.) Then you could maintain a "never delete"
sort of structure with things like this topic has drifted towards falling into
a water-cooler sort of topic head.

(Just off hand my mind cringes imagining the LKML structured as a forum.)
{^_^}