Solution Coming Re: Fedora Community: Under threat?

[akonstam at trinity.edu]

On Mon, Feb 07, 2005 at 02:19:22AM -0200, Alexandre Oliva wrote:
> On Feb  6, 2005, Gain Paolo Mureddu <gmureddu at prodigy.net.mx> wrote:
> 
> > [I] have never had any trouble with say V-Bulletin (yeah, I know
> > their fame) message boards, even on some servers with as high
> > traffic as our list here. I guess it's up to the site admins to set
> > a good set of options for archiving and a good search tool (with an
> > *SQL backend most probably) to make it easy for the users to find
> > what they're looking for.
> 
> If the main issue is to enable users to find answers to questions that
> have been answered before, a good search engine in the mailing list
> archives would be fine.
> 
> But people willing to help can't easily keep track of new questions
> yet to be answered, how are we ever going to create the good,
> searchable archive of answered questions?
> 
> Web forums are just too time-consuming if you want to have the choice
> of keeping up with everything that is discussed in a forum.
> Downloading the entire forum in background and then skimming through
> the threads and reading whatever looks interesting without having to
> wait a few seconds to download the contents of whatever
> topic/thread/message you choose to read, is far more efficient than
> clicking on a topic/thread/message, waiting a few seconds until it's
> displayed and then reading its contents in just as many seconds.
> 
> 
> Warren's posting focuses on part of the problem, namely, that of
> creating a good environment for people to find help with problems they
> run into.  I believe a good searchable web front-end to any forum (be
> it e-mail, news or your typical web forum) could accomplish just that.
> 
> The other important part of the problem is to help people willing to
> help answer questions.  I doubt any web forum interface would enable
> people willing to help to do so efficiently and effectively, and
> without those answers, the web forum would be just a board on which
> people would post questions and not get answers.  In order to be
> efficient for the helpers, a web forum would have to have a gateway to
> e-mail and/or news, so as to enable helpers to remove the latency of
> web interactions, and let them (err, us? :-) organize the information
> that is most suitable to them.  And if there's a gateway to e-mail
> and/or news, e-mail and/or news might as well be a first-class entry
> point to the forum, just as much as the corresponding web forum.
> 
> Web forums just force you into a specific form to display and access
> information.  They're intrinsically against the principles behind Free
> Software, that are meant to enable you to modify the software in
> whatever way suits you best.  Web forums that offer the information in
> forms meant for other programs to handle, in the form of web services,
> XML-RPC, whatever, will let you do that, but they require people to
> reinvent wheels not only on the server side, but also on client sides,
> because good, threaded mail/news reading programs are unlikely to
> support such custom web forum protocols.  I.e., you lose no matter how
> you look at web forums.
> 
> -- 
I just want to second what has been said above. This proposed switch is
just a bad idea.
-- 

=======================================================================
I consider a new device or technology to have been culturally accepted when
it has been used to commit a murder.
		-- M. Gallaher
-------------------------------------------
Aaron Konstam
Computer Science
Trinity University
One Trinity Place.
San Antonio, TX 78212-7200

telephone: (210)-999-7484
email:akonstam at trinity.edu