Please read: Wine(HQ) needs a reorganization (AppDB, Bugzilla, etc.)

[Joseph Garvin]

Tony Lambregts wrote:

> It's been there a long time...
>
> http://www.winehq.org/site/forums
>
> look at [Archive 2]
>
> -- 
>
> Tony Lambregts


That's not very good from a usability standpoint. The gmane link is 
buried as Archive2. It's not at all clear that Archive1 (winehq 
pipermail) doesn't let you post new messages while Archive2 (gmane) 
does. And maybe a more experienced gmane user will correct me, but it 
doesn't look like there's any way to tell what posts are new since your 
last visit.

Now actually having looked at gmane, I can say that it's not nearly as 
newb friendly as a real phpBB forum would be -- it wasn't even 
immediately obvious that I could post replies, and the option is labeled 
"Followup" a term which no modern forum/bulletin board uses anymore and 
people won't recognize. That, and the option is in the frame displaying 
the list of posts in the thread, and not in the frame containing the 
message body (the thing the user actually perceives they want to reply to).

That the World of Warcraft thread in the Gentoo Gamer's and Players 
forum has become the center for discussion for running WoW under wine 
for ALL distributions I think says something about the newb friendliness 
of the mailing lists. Not to disparage the mailing lists -- they let 
developers use their preferred interface for writing text. But people 
are going to phpBB forums that aren't even for their own distro before 
they e-mail wine-devel.

Even if the forum didn't get much developer participation there would at 
least be a place for all wine users to go, with some nice sticky posts 
detailing how to submit bugs and test against cvs, something other 
forums aren't doing. Wine could probably pick up a lot of good bug 
reports this way.