Re-proposal: web forums

[Dimi Paun]

On Sat, April 22, 2006 9:45 pm, Molle Bestefich said:
> Can you explain what's so different between Google and a forum search?

That's pretty obvious: the Google search is just a lot better.
Remember when we used to offer our own search on WineHQ? It
sucked so badly it wasn't even funny. I'm pretty sure that even
now the Google search is way better than anything the forum can
ever provide.

This is of course not an argument against the forum. It's just
that the search argument is not for forum either :)

Folks, I think these debates are a bit pointless. I know, I absoutely
detest forums too, but this is irrelevant. For reasons I can not fathom
it looks like some people like them. Let's not debate the reasons, we're
not going to get anywhere: de gustibus non dispudandum est and all that.

The only thing that is of concern is whether by creating them
we are going to harm rather than help the community. For one,
I think it will have very little, if any, impact on wine-devel,
as most folks here can't stand them anyway. So it is purely a
wine-users kind of thing.

So what can happen? The only negative thing would be for the forum
to not get used, unsuspecting users would use them, and get no real
support, resulting in frustrated newbies. One cool thing that we can
do to avoid that is to simply automatically forward forum posts to
wine-users, and maybe automatically post replies from wine-users on
to the forum. That would be ideal.

Bottom line: let's implement a forum, and see how it goes. If we can
get the wine-users <--> forum gateway, it would be perfect. If not,
we have to give it a few months and see if it catches on. If it does
not, we'll take it out of its misery. Problem solved.

-- 
Dimi Paun <dimi at lattica.com>
Lattica, Inc.