[OpenIndiana-discuss] Help with website

[Peter Tribble]

On Sun, Oct 9, 2011 at 8:24 PM, Gregory Youngblood
<gregory at youngblood.me> wrote:
.
> And, if we do start a web forum, until we have a critical mass of active "experts" able to answer questions, I believe we should have the forum gated to the mailing lists. Otherwise we'll end up with two classes of users and answers.  It takes work to build a forum and get the community active and helping each other, and without gating the forums to the mailing list I'm betting there will be frustrating delays between questions asked and answers that really help them from those that are not used to checking the forums too. I don't see the gate between forum and mailing list being there forever though.

Seriously, don't go there. The way that interaction works with mailing
lists and fora is essentially incompatible. Trying to link the two (like
opensolaris did) is a recipe for disaster. Any conversation that crosses
over between the two worlds gets fragmented and simply annoys people
on both sides of the fence. And you'll have two classes of people anyway
- some people can't get on with email, others can't abide a forum.

> There's not an easy answer here.

That's definitely true...

(I would also point out that those of us discussing this subject on a mailing
list may not be representative or unbiased.)

-- 
-Peter Tribble
http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/