Re: Questions about the new GNOME Forums

[Dave Neary <dneary gnome org>]

Hi,

On 11/21/2012 08:17 PM, Karen Sandler wrote:
> On Wed, November 21, 2012 1:14 pm, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> > Are those new forums:
> > http://forums.worldofgnome.org/
> > the official GNOME forums?
> >
> > If so, why does they not follow the GNOME web style used on gnome.org,
> > and more importantly, why are they hosted on a fansite
> > (worldofgnome.org) instead of gnome.org?
>
> These are unofficial forums (now labeled clearly as such), though I think
> we should consider making them official at some point, perhaps after a
> period of time where we can see how they do.
>
> I think newcomer users really expect to get information in the forum
> format, so I think it could be very useful. I guess we'll see what happens
> there in the meantime :)

Forums require little up-front investment - you don't get email to your 
in-box when you join the forum, you can read forums without joining at 
all, the archives are often easier to search than mailman archives, 
there's no expectation on the part of forum members that everyone reads 
all the forum posts... When you're not part of the community, it's an 
easy way to interact with active community members, without committing.


People inside the community, in general, hate forums for the same 
reasons people outside love them - there's no guarantee when you send a 
message that it will be read by the people who need to read it, you 
actually need to go there to read messages, notifications on most forums 
suck (with the exception of "subscribe to this topic" features) so you 
need to stop working, go visit a website, and see who's replied to your 
question/comment. The SNR is much lower, because the barrier to entry is 
lower. And you can't batch process forums the way you can emails. Forums 
also don't make it easy for you to flag certain content as important the 
way you can email threads/posts.


So it doesn't surprise me to see people pushing back against forums 
here. And it wouldn't surprise me to see a lot of push-back from active 
forum posters to joining a mailing list. A StackExchange channel (or 
whatever they call them) might be a nice half-way house, but there's 
always going to be conflict between the "low investment, high noise, sip 
from the firehose" environment of forums and "high investment, lower 
noise, batch process" environment of mailing lists. Both are useful for 
different audiences.

Cheers,
Dave.





--
Dave Neary, Lyon, France
Email: dneary gnome org
Jabber: nearyd gmail com