New Wine help and discussion forum

[L. Rahyen]

On Monday October 29 2007 18:18, Steven Edwards wrote:
> I think long term we might want to see about  just
> killing the users mailing
> list if the forum proves to be much more popular.

	NO! I strongly disagree. In fact, I'm pretty active on wine-user. But I never 
will be active on the forum. Not because I dislike forums... I dislike bad 
and extremely slow interface. Just an example: there is 5 posts in different 
(or new) threads. It will take a LOT of time to view them all: I need to wait 
100-1000 times more between reading each message (about few seconds instead 
of few milliseconds)! It is impossible to answer without logging in. This 
simply is not fun for me... Please note that my connection speed is 512 
Kb/sec.
	Few years ago I actively participated in one forum (with completely unrelated 
topic) based on phpBB but there was possibility to get ALL messages to my 
mailbox. In order to answer it is enough to just click corresponding link in 
the message. It still far from perfect (because it is impossible to just 
answer) but this is still much better - at least I can read without wasting 
my time by clicking threads on the forum.
	Therefore it is clear that only perfect solution - is "forum front-end" to 
mailing list. Nothing else. This just a joke of course :) ! Because in 
reality there is no perfect solution for this problem! This is exactly why 
people use multiple places to discuss something.

> The idea is to have ONE central place for all user discussions. Most users
> these days tend to be content with a forum

	If you want to create central forum for discussing WINE you need to make sure 
that http://winehq.org have direct link to it. Otherwise it is unlikely (but 
possible) that it will be central place for discussion. Just a suggestion.
	I don't think that popularity and decision to destroy ML is related. Example: 
let's imagine that we have forum with 500 messages per day for discussing 
WINE. Mailing list (wine-users) have 3-15 messages per day. Does this mean we 
should kill it? No. Because there still users asking for help there and there 
still someone who want to help them.
	Only when we have 0 messages on wine-users for weeks we may think about 
killing it. Until then there is no point to discuss this.

	OK, let's be smart. WINE will be discussed on forums because they are 
popular. ML are still enough popular too - so it is unlikely that all people 
will stop using them in favor of one central forum.
	In other words: I see no harm in creating forum for users (everyone is free 
to disagree but this doesn't change my personal opinion). I see no harm in 
having central ML if we have central forum. BUT I *see* harm in destroying ML 
that have (much) more than 0 messages per week. This is my point.
	So if you or someone else think that (central) forum will help users - great. 
If you create option to mail all new messages from the forum to the mailbox - 
even better. But it is up to the forum maintainer to decide.
	In short: while any ML have (much) more than 0 message per week we shouldn't 
destroy that ML. This is my opinion and I will not change it.