Re-proposal: web forums

[Tom Spear (Dustin Booker, Dustin Navea)]

Kai Blin wrote:
> * "Tom Spear (Dustin Booker, Dustin Navea)" <speeddymon at gmail.com> [23/04/06, 11:40:39]:
>   
>> Yes you do, but personally I hate the appdb, and im rarely ever going to 
>> pull up irc even though it is installed, because i dont like having to 
>> switch networks back and forth. 
>>     
>
> [...]
>
>   
>> I'm sure that the majority of users (the non-techies anyways) will 
>> second most of what I said above.  I think the winehq site suffers from 
>> information overload (theres waaaay too much info all over it), and so 
>> putting a forum in will make things a lot easier to maintain..
>>     
>
> How will a forum make maintance easier? I would see that for a Wiki
> where everybody can edit.. but a forum?
>   
See directly below..  People see all of these choices on where to go to 
get help, but dont like any of them (dont want to be flooded with 
emails, dont want to search the archives, or it isnt in the archives, 
dont know how to use bugzilla and dont want to learn, dont like the 
appdb, etc, etc, etc), so they go to somewhere else.  The wiki isnt 
really designed for posting questions to, so they dont use that either..
>   
>> Personally I think all we need is winehq, bugzilla, the mailing lists 
>> and the forums.  IRC can stay, but lets make it our own server, 
>> irc.winehq.org, so that we have some control over what happens.. versus 
>> not having any control when the server dies.  Come to think of it, I 
>> have been netadmin for multiple irc networks, and server admin on 
>> several others.  Hell most of my C experience was in modifying servers 
>> to do what I wanted, and to fix bugs that the devs didn't properly 
>> fix...  I may be a bit rusty, but I would be glad to get another shell 
>> account somewhere and host irc.winehq.org out of my own pocket (maybe 
>> with a little help from the fund, but not much), and at the same time I 
>> can put the forums on there too..
>>     
>
> Two things:
> * How would getting our own IRC server fix the "having to switch
>   networks back and forth" problem? As opposed to freenode, where I can
>   hang out in #wine-devel, #winehq, #samba-technical and so on, I now
>   need to switch networks if I want to go from #wine-devel to
>   #samba-technical.
>   
It doesnt prevent that, it just makes it easier to control how fast the 
server comes back up in the event it goes down for whatever reason..
> * You said some paragraphs before that you didn't like IRC. Why do you
>   suddenly volunteer to run a server?
>   
I didnt say I didnt like IRC, matter of fact I love it, but I have too 
much other things running on my computer and going on in my life to keep 
something like xchat or mirc (depending on what box im on) open all the 
time like i do for thunderbird..  If I'm renting a shell, I setup the 
server and forget about it, plus I'm more likely to spend time in 
#winehq, etc, if I am running the server it is on, because that way I 
can monitor when it goes down, etc.

Tom

> Just my EUR 0.02
> Kai