[OpenLayers-Users] Web Forum for OpenLayers

[Jon Blower]

I second what John said.  A good search interface to the mailing list
would be much more useful than a forum to me.  Also, I've tried
running a forum and found that interest from users dwindled very
quickly, and the maintenance effort and spam filtering overtook the
benefit.  I now monitor precisely zero forums, but several mailing
lists.

I also agree with the argument about fracturing the community.  I
think it's good to have *one* place for users to post messages, then
another place (website/wiki) for collating information (e.g. FAQs that
really are FAQs).

Having said all that, the reason we are all on this mailing list is
presumably because we think the mailing list way of doing things is
valuable...

Jon

On 3/28/07, John Cole <john.cole at uai.com> wrote:
> -1 for forums, sorry.  Like Christopher, I tend not to monitor them closely,
> even with a Vista RSS widget on my desktop :-)  I do think there should be a
> really good searchable archive for the mailing list though, as I do like to
> go back and search them.  This may already exist, but it should be linked
> from an obvious OL web page.
>
> John
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: users-bounces at openlayers.org [mailto:users-bounces at openlayers.org] On
> Behalf Of Christopher Schmidt
> Sent: Wednesday, March 28, 2007 8:16 AM
> To: users at openlayers.org
> Subject: [OpenLayers-Users] Web Forum for OpenLayers
>
> In comments to the OpenLayers Blog, a user requested:
>
> "
> I would like to see a web based forum for OpenLayers, such as phpBB, and
> not just the Nabble version."
> --
> http://openlayers.org/blog/2007/03/26/welcome-to-the-openlayers-blog/#commen
> t-4
>
> There are many reasons why I'm not in favor of this: the most important
> being that I've never found a piece of forum software that I felt didn't
> suck to either use or maintain :)
>
> However, I'm not one to limit discussion based on my personal
> preferences. I'd like to get an idea of whether a web-based forum would
> be a good thing for OpenLayers.
>
> The reasons I'm against it:
>  * Forums are (for me) difficult to use, and I would probably never look
>    at it. This applies in a larger sense of,
>  * It fractures the community. If we have two excellent contributors on
>    the mailing list, and two excellent contributors on the forum, then
>    the users don't get the full range of possible assistance from either.
>  * Additional adminstration headache. But this is personal, since most
>    of the  user community doesn't have to maintain the forum, obviously.
>
> So I think the most important thing to me is the fracturing of the
> community.
>
> On the other hand, there is probably a (reasonable) argument that some
> users won't bother with the mailing list at all, and those users are
> simply lost to us. I don't have enough information to determine if this
> is important enough to the project at this point to fracture the
> community.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Regards,
> --
> Christopher Schmidt
> MetaCarta
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Dr Jon Blower              Tel: +44 118 378 5213 (direct line)
Technical Director         Tel: +44 118 378 8741 (ESSC)
Reading e-Science Centre   Fax: +44 118 378 6413
ESSC                       Email: jdb at mail.nerc-essc.ac.uk
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