Re: Site for LedgerSMB Forum

[Ed W <..hidden..>]

Hi

>  I wasn't going to say anything, but now that Josh has I'll chime in too. I 
> agree with Josh's statement above, and I can add to it. One of my current 
> clients (a fairly popular distro vendor) actually tried to move to forums 
> about a year or so ago. The backlash was so bad that they had to quickly 
> abandon it and stick with the mailing lists.
>   


This debate has been had on so many other projects out there.  It just 
seems to go around in circles

Personally I dislike web forums and prefer email forums with a decent 
archive.  However, in general this is the preference of the "techie" and 
people who are less technical seem to strongly prefer web forums (and to 
be fair the search function is frequently better than it is on most 
mailing list archives).  I guess it's just like the netnews guys who 
moan that it's a much better system than email, and yet how many 
projects reach for a newsgroup before they setup mailing lists...?  
(Personally I prefer usenet to mailing lists, but I guess that just 
shows my age...)

AMP/FreePBX used some software that tied their forums and mailing lists 
together and actually it seemed pretty good with some caveats.  Forums 
seem to need quite a lot of maintenance and computing horsepower.  A 
compromise can be to host (or really just archive) the group somewhere 
like google where you get a kind of mixed forum/mailing list... (again, 
doesn't do it for me personally...)

I think the solution is to run both and different kinds of people will 
migrate to each.  The forums probably need to be run by someone more 
user focused who has time to keep the software maintained and 
spam/hacker resistant.  Anyone prepared to step up to plate?

Good luck

Ed W