Do we need a forum?

[L. Rahyen]

On Thursday February 21 2008 16:37:15 Tom Wickline wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 18, 2008 at 8:19 PM, L. Rahyen <research at science.su> wrote:
> >  > Tom is committed to doing this with
> >  > wine-forum. If there is something you don't like, such as the
> >  > registration, advertisements, etc I am sure he is willing to adjust
> >  > the user experience.
> >
> >         OK, then if he is reading this list hopefully he will consider my
> > words as feature request. If he really will fix these issues that would
> > be great. Thanks.
>
> Sorry for the late reply, ive caught the flu bug and ive been sick for
> the past week.
>
> I have yet to receive the first email of complaint about the
> advertisements on the forum.
> I know the Kontera adverts are considered by some as nag, pop-up
> advertising but ive yet to receive a message or email asking me to remove
> them.

	Well, personally I don't care about ads. I simply don't see them in most 
cases anyway. I use complex custom filters on all web-pages - and 
auto-removing of ads is just of one their features. In fact, I even didn't 
know about existence of ads on wine-forum (and many other sites)! BTW, I 
never mentioned ads in my messages as a problem...

> As for registration, every forum ive ever visited asked for registration,
> sorry but I don't understand what your asking for?
>
> Tom

	Well, there is some forums which provides "quick reply" form at the bottom of 
the thread (on any of its pages). If you are logged in, you can type text 
there and then submit it as usually. If you are not logged in, you will be 
able to enter your nickname, protection code and text with your reply. 
Protection code is intended as protection from "spam bots". Usually, 
protection code provided as somewhat noisy image with few digits and user 
should recognize them and enter correctly in the "protection code" field. 
Sometimes additional optional fields with password is provided so user can 
login and send an answer simultaneously. If he/she leave password field blank 
then reply is posted anyway with provided nickname but with "guest" settings 
(such as default avatar for all guests or not avatar at all, etc.) and guest 
privileges. Sometimes nickname collisions are allowed, sometimes not. 
Typically it is good idea to make "guest" settings in the way that clearly 
marks all guest posts as such.
	However, depending on the code base of a forum, it may be simple to integrate 
such a feature, or hard.

	But registration is one-time problem, especially for people who just want to 
ask one question or answer to some topic (that was found using Google for 
example) and don't plan to use the forum frequently. And many people can 
consider this as "minor" issue.
	More important problem is lack of ability to subscribe for all messages from 
the forum as as well as inability to answer via standard mail client. These 
problems are most important. wine-forum.org doesn't provide such 
functionality. It would be great if this is fixed.
	*At least* there should be possibility to subscribe to all messages from the 
forum and possibility to answer by clicking on the link (to the reply form on 
the forum) in each e-mail message from the forum (direct processing of the 
e-mail answers is even better but can be harder to implement). It is also 
important that after you logged in you don't need to login every time again 
and there is no short timeout (use of cookies is necessary for this to work). 
But I have no idea how hard/easy will be to implement these features on 
wine-forum.org because I know very little about vBulletin used by wine-forum.

	I think that recently created http://forum.winehq.org/ seems to be the best 
solution. Registration there isn't a problem because anyone can write a 
message directly to the mailing list without registration on the forum. This 
is exactly what I imagine as a perfect solution suitable for all users: 
everyone can post answers without logging in (via the mailing list), 
everybody can use forum or mailing list (depending on personal choice), and 
it is possible to receive and answer using any e-mail client you like. So I 
think winehq.org now have very good forum with nice sync with wine-users 
mailing list! I really like it. In fact it solves all major problems that I 
mentioned in my previous messages!