Re: [Vserver] VServer forum

On Thursday 20 October 2005 06:59 am, Stephen Harris wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 20, 2005 at 08:30:11AM +0200, Herbert Poetzl wrote:
> > the main question is, do we need 'another forum'?
>
> Mailing lists are a lot better than web forums (IMHO). I've dropped
> out of more than one community when they transferred to web forums
> from mailing lists (although some people might not think that's a bad
> thing ;-))
>
> I don't answer many questions here (2 or 3 in the past few months only)
> so my opinion isn't too important!
>

I have found both to be very helpful. Mailing lists are excellent but for me I
find it difficult to wait through a search of tens of thousands of msgs for
some content I am looking for. There is an extreme convenience in mailing
lists in that, one.. they come into your home therefore seem more personal...
two you can maintain your own 'database' of sorts to search at your liesure
however it does get to be difficult when manipulating,say, 25,000 msgs. :)
The linux-vserver project has, I believe, one of the most responsive mailing
lists I have seen, and the irc is excellent for solving problems in
real-time.

I use the gentoo forum as an example. It is large, very active, and I have yet
to do a search that did not result in a fast return on my search criteria.
New content not covered was responded to quickly by many, some quite helpful
and others not so much... just have to use judgement.

To me forums seem less 'personal' in that I have to 'go' somewhere to get my
answers and for that effort it still is not in real time as irc would be. I
think the primary beauty of forums is topic organization and speed and ease
of searches. However, in this case, a forum is just one more place to pay
attention to. I personally think the mailing list and irc are sufficient for
any discussion.

both have their strong and weak points... what would be nice instead of an
interactive forum, but a bit difficult to implement, would be to create some
kind of parsing program to parse the entire mailing list archives into a
database, then present the database data in 'forum' form for easy searching
and reading. I believe this would answer a need for a 'forum style' facility,
and would make finding answers *considerably* easier for everyone. I don't
know of a topic that has not been resolved somewhere in the mailing list
archives. Resolutions done on irc, if not covered in the mailiing list could
be submitted to the database for inclusion, and by running this update
program a few times a day looking for new data, the 'forum' facility would be
updated almost in real time.

I also believe in people having the freedom to create a forum if they wish,
but it would be a personal thing run as many personal gentoo forums are and
not officially sanctioned.. I think the developers have enough to do keeping
up with mailing list and irc and I would never expect them to add more to
their list to watch... what we need to do as users is to assist them by
developing this huge wealth of data already existing in the mailing list
archives and in irc logs into some kind of organized, easy to use, one-stop
information facility like this forum-database idea.

> --
>
> rgds
> Stephen
> _______________________________________________
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> Vserver@list.linux-vserver.org
> http://list.linux-vserver.org/mailman/listinfo/vserver
>

-- 
Chuck
"...and the hordes of M$*ft users descended upon me in their anger,
and asked 'Why do you not get the viruses or the BlueScreensOfDeath
or insecure system troubles and slowness or pay through the nose 
for an OS as *we* do?!!', and I answered...'I use Linux'. "
The Book of John, chapter 1, page 1, and end of book
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