[Qgis-user] Re: Closure of forum

[Nick Hopton]

It's difficult. The people who don't like forums don't like them because
forums don't take a nice, clean, top-down, structured approach. This is true
of course, forums are informal, are quite often rambling, but they can also
be very friendly places.

I don't know how many people have downloaded and installed QGIS over the
years. Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, perhaps. My guess would be
that most of these people were not trained GIS professionals at all and they
won't have nice, top-down structured brains. They'll be like me, wanting to
start in the middle with something they half-understand and then work
outwards from there. I don't think that Stack Exchange will suit them (for
reasons that I mentioned earlier) nor I think will this place (Quantum GIS -
User).

For what it's worth, I still believe that QGIS needs an informal, friendly
place of first resort for newcomers and the less-experienced. Everyone has
to start somewhere and the most important thing is to get them doing
something, anything. Plot a few GPS tracks, trace a few shapes from Google
Earth and turn them into a map, anything to get them going.

Having said all this, I still don't know about the best way forward. The old
forum was good, Google Groups are good too. As suggested, even a new list on
Nabble perhaps, informal and aimed at newcomers and the less-experienced, a
beginners corner. A new list on Nabble would at least fit into an existing
hierarchy, if this is important.

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