[ubuntu-uk] Online Discussion Forum - To be or not to be?

[Alan Pope]

On Mon, Oct 09, 2006 at 05:37:04PM +0100, "tedsmith28 at yahoo.co.uk" wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I realise it was spoken about some week ago, but I really do feel that
> perhaps we should re-visit the possibility of an online discussion forum.

For what purpose? Having a mailing list *and* a forum almost always leads to
a split in a community. You generally find people who prefer mailing lists
stay on the list, people who prefer forums stay there. This leads to
fragmented and duplicated discussions.

> A
> simple website, with nothing more than a discussion forum if we want. It
> doesn't have to be anything major. I could rattle one up in a weekend for us
> if people were interested.

Throwing together a forum based site does indeed take no time at all.
Keeping it fresh, drawing people in and maintining discussion is another
thing. I've seen many forums started (and to be fair mailing lists) where
the motivation is lost quickly and you end up with 10 sub-forums each with 3
messages. That's just my experience of them.

> I know we had the big CMS debate some time back,
> but I think that was not directly related, or was it?
> 

There's definately an argument to be had about how the Ubuntu-UK represents
itself online. A content management system would enable bringing together
submissions of data from people within the community. But those people
probably already commit their content to blogs (and hence aggregated content
in planets), mailing lists, irc and so on. Putting a forum up might spread
those people even thinner. I know I wouldn't simply because using a forum is
(in my opinion) considerably more time consuming than a mailing list. 

> Personally, I prefer discussion forum layout much more than these e-mail
> distributions which often I find difficult to read.
> 

I can only boggle at the thought of how a forum with all the stupid avatars
and scrolling and clicking back and forth can be easier than plain text. I
have no clue what you mean there, sorry :)

> I also rent a VPS (Virtual Private Server) that all my websites are on
> (www.f3.org.uk, www.lost-doggies.com etc)  so it wouldn't cost much really.

I don't think hosting would be a problem. There's plenty of people here who
have some space/bandwidth. It's keeping it up to date as I said.

> I wouldn't charge for the additional VPS space (although I'd accept
> donations of course). So the only real cost would be the hiring of the
> domain name. If we use something like 'ubuntuUK.com' or 'ubuntuuk.org' they
> are all free and cost about £20 for two years. We could buy all the major
> one's for about £100.
> 

We already have a domain name - ubuntu-uk.org, having separate ones would
again lead to fragmentation of an already small (but in my opinion) high
quality community.

Just my 2p. Not trying to rain on your parade, but you did ask :)

Cheers,
Al.