Re-proposal: web forums

[Scott Ritchie]

On Sat, 2006-04-22 at 13:17 -0500, Jeremy Newman wrote:
> Currently the WineHQ server really does not have much space left over.
> Alexandre and I have had a few issues with the box running out of hard
> drive space.
Well, you're in luck: we have all the disk space and bandwidth we need
on the new box budgetdedicated.com has given us.  Currently, all it's
doing is hosting a mirror of the .deb APT repository.

User forums would go perfectly there.  Talk to me (YokoZar) on IRC or
shoot me an email, as currently only I have root to the machine.

> We need to know if this is really needed. Is providing a forum really
> better than: a good FAQ in the Wiki, the forums in the AppDB, Bugzilla,
> the mailing lists, and finally IRC? We already provide quite a few
> levels of help.
> 

Absolutely, yes, forums are essential.  For a case in point, take a look
at the ubuntu forums: http://www.ubuntuforums.org/

Note how a ton of things get posted there, despite Ubuntu having about
40 different mailing lists as well - many people, myself included,
greatly prefer web forums to mailing lists.

Also note that a ton of things related to [i]wine[/i] itself get posted
there.  I run a daily search for Wine and end up finding about 15 new
posts a day on it.  There is, quite clearly, a user demand for web
forums that we are not satisfying, and as a result they go post
elsewhere (such as the Ubuntu forums, or the forums on linuxgamers.net,
or even Something Awful's tech forum), or, in many cases, don't post at
all.

This makes perfect sense to me: I _hate_ mailing lists, especially the
kind that I have to subscribe to in order to post - it's far easier to
run a search on a web forum (rather than googling the list archives),
and if my issue isn't resolved I can create an account and not have to
worry about receiving emails or unsubscribing.

> The other issue I have is that just adding a forum, is yet another
> login/password for users to have. What I don't like about the WineHQ
> website is that the AppDB and Bugzilla do not share a common login
> system. Adding a bboard just adds more to this problem.
> 
> Now, I do not see a reason why the AppDB guys could not use the already
> written forum in the AppDB to create a not tied to an app forum. Follow
> me?
> 
Integration with AppDB would be great, but it's hardly as essential as
getting a forum up in the first place.  Seriously, the worst thing that
can happen is it doesn't get used much...not unlike the mailing list
itself.

> On Sat, 2006-04-22 at 14:39 +0100, Mike Hearn wrote:
> > Running phpBB or some similar type web forum software, with official links
> > and so on from WineHQ. Newman, what do you think, do we have server
> > capacity to do this? Do you have time to set it up?
> 
I can help set this up too, if need be.

Thanks,
Scott Ritchie