rfc: Bazaar forums

[John Arbash Meinel]

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Martin Pool wrote:
| stevea suggested the other day that we might look in to setting up
| some Bazaar web forums, along the lines of <ubuntuforums.com>.  I can
| see a couple of benefits: some users may be more happy in that medium.
|  Also, if you find something relevant in a web search it is easier to
| reactivate it in a forum than on a mailing list.  They do seem pretty
| popular these days.
|
| There is a risk that unless some of the more active and knowledgeable
| people monitor it, questions would go unanswered, though hopefully one
| would eventually get to a critical mass where at least there were
| enough people there who could answer the common questions and send
| real bugs to the bugtracker or list.  It can already be annoying or
| disruptive to some people when conversations move between the bug
| tracker, list, etc, and this would be another place they might start.
|
| And there is a cost in the effort of setting it up and ongoing
| maintenance (like deleting spam, probably), but I am hopeful that at
| least some of the former could be done by Canonical IT.
|
| So, what do you think?  Would you read or use such a thing?  Do you
| know of potential or current Bazaar users who'd be happier on a forum?
|

I have some sites that I track which are forums. The ones I use have the ability
to track what messages I've read (from any machine), and let me quickly jump to
an "active topics" listing that shows me recent messages.

For low-volume, it isn't too hard to visit the "recent" page from time to time,
and make sure I'm caught up.

The good:
~  1) Active is based on thread, so I can jump to the last point that I read, and
~     continue onwards. It doesn't require following multiple emails, etc.

~  2) I don't know if it is more/less intimidating than email. I suppose it is
~     more obviously parsed into threads, so it is easier to get only what you
~     want.

The bad:
~  1) I'd be responsible for reading all threads, so while it is nice to read
~     them threaded, it is a bit harder to jump to all the threads I might need
~     to read.

~  2) It is a polling architecture, where I have to manually go check the site to
~     see if there is anything to respond to. So it is one more place I need to
~     do that. E-mail seems to "come to me" more, especially with the "toast"
~     popping up to tell me I might want to check it.  This may be a good thing,
~     if I can poll it less often. It may be a bad thing if I spend a lot of time
~     polling, or don't poll often enough.

~     My first thought was if I could get an email when new things are posted...
~     which sort of negates any benefit of having the forum (for *me*).

I guess ultimately, if we just used something more like GMane. Which is a thread
<=> email interface. You certainly could create a whole forum design, with a
back-end of emails.

John
=:->
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