[Qgis-user] Why isn't there a support forum for QGIS?

[Alex Mandel]

On 10/05/2013 04:07 PM, Kelly Bellis wrote:
> Thank you for the reply Alex.
> 
> I gather from your reply that you were on the Steering Committee, or at least in 
> agreement with their decision. As a new QGIS user and beta tester for many 
> different softwares over the past 20 years coming from many diverse communities 
> I can attest that the coldly clinical approach taken at gis.stackexchange has 
> done more to alienate me from using QGIS than the program crashing unexpectedly 
> or any of the other obstacles that I encountered in the past three days of 
> tests. I've just uninstalled QGIS and am going back to Global Mapper v15 a 
> little wiser for the effort.
> 

I'm actually not on the committee. But I am a system adminstrator and
long time participant in the mailing lists and IRC chat room. I followed
the long threads on this very list, discussing if the old forum should
be closed. The people who requested that it be closed were the most
prominent members who answered questions on the forum.

> As for the amount of work to prevent spammers, I'm very familiar having built 
> and maintained numerous BBS / forums / websites over the years; however, that 
> amount of work seems to pale in comparison to the tremendous policing efforts at 
> gis.stackexchange to monitor, edit or censor each question I raised and under no 
> stretch of the imagination would I ever refer to it as a forum. A forum is where 
> open discussion is engendered, not suppressed.
> 

I personally almost never went to or found answers on the old forum. I
understand that the StackExchange mentality of Question and Answers, no
discussions is a little harsh, but the voting system makes the solutions
show up much better in search engines and to end users. The intersting
part about policing on stackexchange is that I don't think it's
necessarily the core QGIS people who do most of it, so in some sense
it's significantly less work on our part.

> Please don't misunderstand, gis.stackexchange has some excellent core concepts 
> in addressing very technical issues in a no-nonsense, no-chit-chat approach - 
> just leave the gestapo out of it.
> 
This is the design of stackexchange.

> Kind regards and best wishes,
> 
> Kelly
> 

The whole thing is kinda tricky, for some reason Forum users don't like
to use mailing lists and mailing list user don't like to use Forums. So
in the past we simply had tons of threads with zero discussion or
answers. I think StackExchange was a middle ground. If many in the
community feel it still isn't working then maybe something needs to change.

I'll once again point out if you use Nabble, it's almost exactly like a
forum, except it happens to be this very mailing list.
http://osgeo-org.1560.x6.nabble.com/Quantum-GIS-User-f4125267.html

Now if you said this mailing list was unfriendly to conversations about
QGIS, I hope we've proven that isn't the case.

Thanks,
Alex

> 
> 
> On 10/5/2013 4:01 PM, Alex Mandel wrote:
>> On 10/05/2013 11:24 AM, Kelly Bellis wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> http://gis.stackexchange.com/  is certainly a nice place to try and find
>>> answers... unless you ask a question like: Why isn't there a support
>>> forum for QGIS?
>>>
>>> Feel free to contact me directly if you don't want to broadcast to the
>>> entire list.
>>>
>>> V. Kelly Bellis, PLS 2099 - 17 Union Street - Ellsworth, ME 04605
>>> kellybellis at gwi.net  <mailto:kellybellis at gwi.net>  - 207.667.6912 -
>>> Horizon Surveying Co.
>>>
>>
>> It was officially decided by the Project Steering Committee (PSC) of
>> QGIS some time ago to discontinue the QGIS specific forum that existed
>> in favor of using stackexchange and QGIS tagged questions. There are
>> several reasons:
>>
>> 1. We already have 2 mailing lists Users & Developers, turns out the
>> overlap between these lists and the Forum was quite small (very few
>> developers ever visited the forum). Both of these lists can be used just
>> like a forum via Nabble.
>> 2. We don't have to maintain a website just for a forum (its a lot of
>> work to prevent spammers).
>> 3. StackExchange is easier for new users coming from other communities
>> who already have an account of some kind that lets them on. It's also
>> more public and discoverable, so it could lead to more people hearing
>> about QGIS. It's also easier for developers who also use other
>> StackExchange sites for other reasons to wander by occasionally and it
>> allows cross pollination with other OSGeo projects, e.g. GDAL or Postgis
>> questions that often start as QGIS questions.
>>
>> So to answer QGIS does have a support Forum, it is
>> http://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/qgis
>> and this mailing list.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Alex
>>
>