<font size=3 face="Arial">Mailing lists, like forums, have advantages
and disadvantages. My own issues with mailing lists are:</font><br><br><font size=3 face="Arial">- Some folks have the misfortune of using
rubbish mail clients (aka Lotus Notes) and so we have no threading etc.</font><br><font size=3 face="Arial">- This email is going to however many thousand
people, but 95%+ will have no interest in it.</font><br><br><font size=3 face="Arial">In the case of Forums or StakeExchange or
Google Groups, users only see what they have an interest in, rather than
being forced to wade through everything.</font><br><br><font size=3 face="Arial">Fundamentally I'm with Bernd though: The
issue isn't so much which method is used to get support, the biggest problem
is that its scattered across a dozen different methods and there's no easy
way to search between them all. No central portal with a decent search
and knowledgebase which allows a user to easily find the answer to a question
that has been asked before.</font><br><br><font size=3 face="Arial">For myself I'll do a web-search and if the
answer doesn't come up, I'll have to ask the community. Things like Facebook
and twitter won't turn up in the results. Some forums do, and some mailing
lists do (via nabble) but its hit and miss. Tickets don't turn up usually
(search engines don't seem to like tickets) but stack overflow does. Of
course, searching only works when you know what you're searching for so
this is best for non-new users who know much of the terminology.</font><br><br><br><font size=3 face="Arial">Jonathan</font><br><br><br><br><br><font size=1 color=#5f5f5f face="sans-serif">From:
</font><font size=1 face="sans-serif">Nick Hopton <nhopton@gmail.com></font><br><font size=1 color=#5f5f5f face="sans-serif">To:
</font><font size=1 face="sans-serif">qgis-user@lists.osgeo.org</font><br><font size=1 color=#5f5f5f face="sans-serif">Date:
</font><font size=1 face="sans-serif">01/04/2012 13:17</font><br><font size=1 color=#5f5f5f face="sans-serif">Subject:
</font><font size=1 face="sans-serif">[Qgis-user]
Re: Closure of forum</font><br><font size=1 color=#5f5f5f face="sans-serif">Sent by:
</font><font size=1 face="sans-serif">qgis-user-bounces@lists.osgeo.org</font><br><hr noshade><br><br><br><tt><font size=2>It's difficult. The people who don't like forums don't
like them because<br>forums don't take a nice, clean, top-down, structured approach. This is
true<br>of course, forums are informal, are quite often rambling, but they can
also<br>be very friendly places.<br><br>I don't know how many people have downloaded and installed QGIS over the<br>years. Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, perhaps. My guess would
be<br>that most of these people were not trained GIS professionals at all and
they<br>won't have nice, top-down structured brains. They'll be like me, wanting
to<br>start in the middle with something they half-understand and then work<br>outwards from there. I don't think that Stack Exchange will suit them (for<br>reasons that I mentioned earlier) nor I think will this place (Quantum
GIS -<br>User).<br><br>For what it's worth, I still believe that QGIS needs an informal, friendly<br>place of first resort for newcomers and the less-experienced. Everyone
has<br>to start somewhere and the most important thing is to get them doing<br>something, anything. Plot a few GPS tracks, trace a few shapes from Google<br>Earth and turn them into a map, anything to get them going.<br><br>Having said all this, I still don't know about the best way forward. The
old<br>forum was good, Google Groups are good too. As suggested, even a new list
on<br>Nabble perhaps, informal and aimed at newcomers and the less-experienced,
a<br>beginners corner. A new list on Nabble would at least fit into an existing<br>hierarchy, if this is important.<br><br>--<br>View this message in context: </font></tt><a href="http://osgeo-org.1560.n6.nabble.com/Closure-of-forum-tp4674587p4676332.html"><tt><font size=2>http://osgeo-org.1560.n6.nabble.com/Closure-of-forum-tp4674587p4676332.html</font></tt></a><tt><font size=2><br>Sent from the Quantum GIS - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com.<br>_______________________________________________<br>Qgis-user mailing list<br>Qgis-user@lists.osgeo.org<br></font></tt><a href="http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-user"><tt><font size=2>http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-user</font></tt></a><tt><font size=2><br></font></tt><br><BR>
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