On 09/11/2013 04:46 PM, John Betley wrote:
I'm in full support of this idea. In order to have more meaningful and on
topic discussions, we have to provide ourselves with the means and tools to
do so. I think having a forum would be excellent.
my personal experience with "we have both a forum and a mailing list"
setups was the opposite unfortunately ... this may have been due to
lack of moderation, but the main point IMHO was that having both
quickly leads to separation (by preferred workflow etc.) without
any actual improvement on either side ...
But then again this is anecdotal, not empiric ...
My greatest concern personally would be the lack of an offline option.
Not that I do matter in current affairs anymore at all, but back in the
days a lot of the work I've done on PHP code, documentation and mailing
lists and newsgroups (yes, we had working UseNet groups at some point)
has happened offline while i was sitting on long distant trains.
Especially catching up with email is something that works very well
while not being distracted by "being online"
So anything that doesn't support offline interaction would be a big
show stopper for me if I were still active here ...
PS: A forum that also supports NNTP might be a solution to the "offline"
problem. A quick search shows that this has at least been discussed
in the context of discourse.org ... from just looking over the
result pages it doesn't look as if it has actually materialized
though?
--
hartmut