[Qgis-psc] QGIS forum

[Maxim Dubinin]

I'd  argue  that  rather  then  trying to educate people using one or
another  support  platform  we  should aim to provide all main options
among which forum is definitely one, very viable and used almost everywhere.

Remember,  we're talking about user tools here, not developer ones. We
don't want three different bug-trackers, but we do want people to use
the  tool  they  like  (or got used too for whatever reasons) to start
trying QGIS and asking around.

We    cannot    impose  overhead  of having stackexchange knowledge or
lack of anonymity on the mailing list on a user to
get  QGIS+support, while he probably spent months on different forums,
and he will grasp it immediately.

My  midnight  rant  was just to say lets show user all support options
and let user  decide,  which one he prefers. I'm afraid message like that
might leave user thinking that he is not welcome on the forum, I would
avoid that.

Maxim

Вы писали 13 июля 2011 г., 0:30:59:

PK> Hi Maxim,

PK> Am Dienstag, 12. Juli 2011, 19.23:02 schrieb Maxim Dubinin:
>> Hi,
>> 
>>  Sorry for intruding PSC list, still unsure what are the rules for posting
>> for non-PSC people.
>> 
>>  I think closing forum might be rather irritating thing to do from the
>> point of view of people who ARE frequent there and provide/obtain support
>> or just read often. 
>> 
>>  Sorry, but I find reasons not enough convincing for closing and largely
>> fixable.
>> 
>>  You shouldn't just shut the door for over 5000 members (I know some of
>> them are bots, but still). Maillists and Stackexchange aren't for everyone
>> and forums have their audience that prefers them over other means.
>> 
>>  To be constructive, (we) NextGIS can offer hosting and maintenance for
>> QGIS forum. This hopefully will solve spam and slowness, we can't
>> guarantee devs, but one of our developers is already "master" member on
>> the forum. We support phpBB forum successfully over 7-8 years
>> at http://gis-lab.info/forum so we know the tool.

PK> IMHO forum users will be greatful when we guide them to a better platform. The
PK> major advantage of gis.stackexchange is the finer granulation of questions. So
PK> gdal and postgis questions are categorized properly and users will get more
PK> accurate answers.
PK> It would be great, if you take over the phpBB forum, but I would still include
PK> a bold message, that new question should be asked in gis.stackexchange or the
PK> mailing list.

PK> Pirmin

>> 
>> 
>>    Hi PSC,
>> 
>>  It has already been discussed on developer mailing list: Some action has
>> to be taken concerning QGIS forums.
>> 
>>  The current situation looks like this:
>>  - The forum attracts a lot of spam every day. 
>>  - The forum is often down or slow to respond. (Therefor it takes a lot of
>> time to remove spam and ban spammers.) - Developers don't frequent the
>> forums so we have to forward people to the mailing list anyway.
>> 
>>  My suggested alternative would be to redirect developer questions to the
>> mailing list and user questions to gis.stackexchange.org. This would
>> reduce web infrastructure complexity for us while at the same time
>> increase our visibility on the platform-independent stackexchange site.
>> 
>>  Since we are on our way to the next big release, updating our web
>> infrastructure and other aspects of the QGIS project, I feel it's
>> necessary to address this topic. 
>> 
>>  Best wishes,