On Sun, 03 Jun 2007 09:58:50 +0100, john cliff wrote:
Your missing my point entirely. A blog is the right kind of tool, but has the big downside that people have to find it.
Not if there's a resource page that points to it. That's the point.
And a planet isnt the answer either, because thats then limited to the people who've been added to the aggregation list. A forum gives you one central point, that you can find all the different relevant discussions, has a low barrier for entry, and encourages discussion. You say you know people who use this as a tool, but thats just the point, you have to know their there, or they need to be linked from somewhere (ie someone else has to have found them first)
There are lots of ways to make people aware of such a thing. That's the "power of the internet" (if you will) - it's possible to tie things together and link them.
You can never cater for everyone, its about looking at a target audience and aiming to cater to them as best you can. Theres gonna be edge cases for everything.
Sure, but arguably you're discussing the possible "elimination" of an "edge case" in a mailing list that is composed primarily of people who are IN that use case scenario.
Looking at the POVray groups yesterday they werent actualluy all that multimedia intensive by the standards of a lot of the places i hang out. (admittedly it was a pretty brief skim, so I could have been unlucky with my sampling.)
You'd have to have looked in the binaries groups in particular, because the community's rules state that that's where images get posted rather than to the other groups. The web interface on news.povray.org actually enforces that for people posting from that interface - the buttons for attaching an image don't even appear in the non-binary groups.
The newsgroups also provide pointers to a number of other resources - as does the povray.org website. In this example, the website is the central repository of pointers. Such a list has to be maintained, of course, but if someone volunteers to do that and does keep things up to date, that becomes a very valuable resource.
I said before and I'll say again, I'm not talking about fragmenting the discussion this list sees, because we see very little creative commentry on here. I'm talking about trying to stimulate some new discussion. Jack of all trades, master of none is the phrase that springs to mind. why do lots of things badly, or cater to lots of people needs badly, when you can do a good job for a focused area? I'd guess our user numbers are well into 6 figures judging by the download figures for 0.45.1 yet we have little to no creative community going on here, clearly a list is not working as an interface for that kind of discussion/community building. You say "a good community does not *exclude* people because of their choice of access to the community" I'd say we're probably excluding a lot of people by the interface we provide currently.
And so my point is that we should consider the existing community while we look to grow the community. We do that by using an integrated solution rather than a series of disconnected "island" solutions.
Providing a web-based forum ALONE is not a good idea, IMHO. Providing a web-based forum that interfaces to mailing lists, NNTP servers, etc - that's a good idea. Creating additional specialized forums is a good idea (I've not advocated using inkscape-user for EVERYTHING, and if that's the impression I gave, I apologise, that's absolutely NOT what I'm saying), but doing so away from the existing infrastructure and providing an inconsistent interface creates an issue for those who have chosen to use the lists and/or NNTP interfaces.
Again using povray.org as an example, they use an NNTP server. Many, many people use it (as evidenced by the traffic in the off-topic group - that group is not available in the web interface), but there are many people who use the web interface *exclusively* because the don't want to use NNTP, or don't know how. They have a CHOICE of accessing using a web- based forum or NNTP.
There are a few solutions that solve this issue of providing multiple interfaces - there's vBulletin (which I mentioned before), there's FUDforum (which I've set up - it duplicates the message base rather than providing a native NNTP client, and there are pros and cons to doing that). There's gmane.org (which gates the list server to the NNTP server).
Creating a solution that provides a web interface, NNTP interface, and mail list interface is not impossible by combining a couple of these. You get a mailing list set up, gate it to NNTP with gmane, and provide a web-based frontend with vBulletin for FUDForum that points to the gmane server. Bingo, you've solved the problem for all three classifications of users.
Jim