[Wine] Mailing list <-> forum gateway

[Alan McKinnon]

On Sunday 02 March 2008, A. Tres Finocchiaro wrote:
> If I read this right, it appears Alan would like a way to filter the
> extremely "noob" questions from the "legit" ones.

That's about right. Or expressed another way - and painting with very 
broad strokes here - the majority of new user questions are along the 
lines of "What is Wine? How do I install it? How do I use it?" A good 
and current FAQ or a forum is a good way to answer these questions.

Users who have been around a while graduate to questions like "I can't 
get app XYZ to run, here is the console output, what can I do about 
this?" and historically the mailing list has dealt with these, and does 
it well.

> In my opinion, its not a bad idea as long as people know how to
> escalate concerns to his inbox.  Quite often, its a "new user" that
> finds a bug thats worth rising a stir about.

I had a think about this, and an idea occurred to me:

I presume the forum has moderators and they read most threads looking 
for abuses. If they were to look for the good stuff as well, perhaps a 
function where a mod can *easily* escalate a query or valid bug to the 
mailing list? It could be automated to generate a new forum post that 
says the query was escalated.

As long as this doesn't result in a two-tier "elitist" environment, 
perhaps it's worth investigating.

-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com