Am Sonntag, den 20.05.2007, 21:23 -0500 schrieb Dave Niezabitowski: Sorry for asking,... do you let your mail prgramm / Thunderbird sort the mails by threads? Florian

I dislike mailing lists also. Which is why I've subscribed using Nabble (www.nabble.com). It allows you to participate on the mailing list via your webbrowser, just like with a forum. I've selected the option to not recieve e-mails from the mailing list, but I will be notified if someone replies to my message. dniezby wrote: -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/forum--tf3787962.html#a10735387 Sent from the Inkscape - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

On Tuesday 22 May 2007 10:46, David Niezabitowski wrote: How so? I collect the Inkscape posts in a separate folder and leave threading on. I scan the folder by subject and read interesting threads. Or I just hit the plus bar and skip to the next unread post. If I need to find a subject or a key word my mail client (Kmail) has excellent search capablity. Works for me. -- John Culleton Able Indexing and Typesetting Precision typesetting (tm) at reasonable cost. Satisfaction guaranteed. http://wexfordpress.com

Jean-Marc Molina-2 wrote: I'd be happy to buy a domain name and host an Inkscape forum. I already pay for a host that's grossly underused for my personal website. The only thing that stops me is that unless you can attract a large enough community it would go to waste. I'm a member of an Illustrator forum which is a far more popular product and yet it only attracts a handful of regular users which makes it's usefulness limited. If someone can suggest a good domain name that might get the ball rolling :) -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/forum--tf3787962.html#a10904794 Sent from the Inkscape - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

Jim Henderson-4 wrote: How many do we have? I can appreciate your point, but only one person has responded to dniezby e-mail with a link to an actual Inkscape Forum - which I didn't see until after I posted. And a Google search (inkscape forum) says there is only one Inkscape forum, in German. That aside, whilst you could argue it divides the community, you could also argue the more website the more exposure. And the strongest one would likely win. One forum would prevent division but if it's poorly maintained and implemented, who would want to use it? Note that this is all argumentative. I'm not attempting to start a mailing-list mutiny :) If I was to start a forum it would be to fill a void. You've suggested there are many forums already, I'm only aware of one. -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/forum--tf3787962.html#a10906807 Sent from the Inkscape - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

Jim Henderson wrote: I'm sorry but I disagree. I think open source is a lot about division. Building a community doesn't mean building a monolithic-one-forum-only community. The more the projects, the better. And it doesn't matter if it divides the community as only the "strongest will survive". New projects increase an open source project activity and improve the creativity of its contributors. If a new forum is created and its "value added" is not strong enough, then it will just vanish into fin air. Its disappearance doesn't matter, the important thing is what it brought to the community : new ideas, new users... As mentionned in an other message it's also possible to bind communities : RSS feeds, NTTP mapping... An other example, more developer oriented, is Inkscape itself. The project itself is "yet another open source project". It's actually a fork of Sodipodi. And many projects are just forks of others : Post-Nuke, eMule... Not forking a project or not providing side-projects and forums would just mean the death of an open source project. There are many reasons to fork a project : add new values, provide new features, build new communities, reinvent the wheel and improve it... So many things to provide, share, create... the possibilities are just endless. To sum things up I get the idea behind your reply because it's important to have a solid community, an official forum, so users quickly get help. But not encouring other users to contribute and create their own forums would mean the death of Inkscape. It would be just an other dead Inkscape, it could even be compared to all these "great" proprietary projects where users are invited to serve and use but not to contribute. Don't get me wrong, in fact I believe projects like Adobe Illustrator are even more "opened" than Inkscape. History I suppose, but Adobe understood that it's all about the community, the more it grows, the better. Everything else is pure garbage. You forgot phpBB :). Seriously I'm not sure "not fragmenting" the community is a good thing. As a French user I can tell I'm very pleased by the French forum we have. This group, our small French community... So I see InkscapeFrench, InkscapeEspa�a, InkscapeMoshiMoshi, InkscapeFrenchInParis, InkscapeFrenchInLyon, InkscapeGalaxy... And if users from Paris and Lyon don't get any answers, well the communities will just "close" and the users will "migrate" to the French one... Messages will be archived and users will be able to search them from communities if needed... I can compare the problem with our recent Presidential election where some people believe in diversity (division, fragmentation...) when others dream of a united country where people would all looked the same (Orwell), one religion, one language (French invasion ahah !) and "one ring to rule them all" :P. I believe in open-open-open source & culture, of course. I want to fork Inkscape, port it to my good old Atari 1040 STE, rewrite its code in pure 68000, translate it for French users-ONLY and build a MinitelT powered community that would costs ?1 each time a user dial 3615 to get help. Who's in ? :D

Dave Niezabitowski schrieb: For german speakers, there are forums dedicated to OpenSource-DTP at www.opendtp.de Best, Tom -- ---------------------------- http://www.thomas-zastrow.de German Forum - DTP under Linux: http://www.opendtp.de ----------------------------

On Fri, 01 Jun 2007 10:36:11 +0200, Jean-Marc Molina wrote: That's what I'd be in favor of (hopefully obviously. ;-) ) There's difference between specializing a forum/list/newsgroup and duplicating an existing one as well. For example, on one set of forums that I follow rather closely, there are something around 100 different products and each has different components - I subscribe to about 100 different newsgroups there. That kind of specialization is *good* - but it's also coherent - I don't have to visit 100 different websites to see the different groups, I go to one place. That's the type of centralization that is useful, IMHO. So, for example, this list is useful for a certain thing; inkscape- developers is useful for those working on development issues. An art/how- to/Inkscape+Blender group would be a specialized group that would cover topics perhaps not covered here. But in order for that type of group to be successful, it needs to be (a) accessible, (b) easy for people to use, and (c) easy to find. I disagree quite strongly with this sentiment - not creating other forums isn't the "death of Inkscape" - if it's not thought out, fragmenting the community in disjoined forums that duplicate efforts could, though. Concentration of expertise is very good for the health of a community - just like centralizing the code in a CVS or SVN repository is good for the project. Sure, you can fork the project if you want. But you just need to look at the Compiz and Beryl projects to see that ultimately taking the changes from one and bringing them into the other is inefficient - a better community synergy was recognized when the two projects merged because the changes weren't divided. Yes, the more the community grows, the better, but growth of the community needs to be done in an organised fashion. If it's because a group here or there formed with no connection back to a point of commonality, it's the growth of a customer base, and not a community. A community that's strong interacts with other parts of the community rather than building islands of expertise that don't know about each other. Even various LUGs around the world are interconnected in a way that makes them a very cohesive community. Like I said (and maybe should have clarified) - a monolithic catch-all discussion group/list/forum is bad, I agree with that. It's that there needs to be some thought put into the process of building the community, rather than anyone with a 'net connection, a server, and a piece of software deciding to create a forum *because they can*. Just because you *can* doesn't mean you *should*, and IMHO certainly not without planning on how to fit things into the larger picture so that there is cohesion. The danger with duplicating existing efforts is that some expertise stays in one place, some goes to another. Now if I have a question about how to use the Perspective effects filter, I ask here, I don't get an answer, now I ask the question in InkscapeGalaxy because there's someone there who might know the answer; I don't get an answer there, so now I go to InkscapeUniverse and ask again - it's very inefficient (to the point of user-hostile) for the person asking the question. Experts generally aren't going to visit multiple different websites to share their wisdom because it's inefficient for them. Eric Raymond, in his article on asking effective questions, states: 'Be sensitive in choosing where you ask your question. You are likely to be ignored, or written off as a loser, if you: * post your question to a forum where it's off topic * post a very elementary question to a forum where advanced technical questions are expected, or vice-versa * cross-post to too many different newsgroups * post a personal e-mail to somebody who is neither an acquaintance of yours nor personally responsible for solving your problem Hackers blow off questions that are inappropriately targeted in order to try to protect their communications channels from being drowned in irrelevance. You don't want this to happen to you. *The first step, therefore, is to find the right forum.*' (Taken from http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html ; Emphasis added) I think we can all agree that ESR has something of a vested interest in he OSS movement. ;-) Finding the right forum to ask the question in is difficult to impossible to do if there's too much duplication within the community. In order to be effective, the community *needs* to be organized in is approach to communications. I may have said this before, so excuse me if I have - I've been doing online forums professionally for nearly 20 years now; I was a SysOp on Compuserve forums (and that wasn't my first experience) and have followed the evolution of forums held on CompuServe into newsgroups on the web. I've worked with proprietary web-based forum software that integrates with an NNTP backend as well as OSS web "forum" software. I've helped design successful online communities for groups ranging from a few hundred users (which is one I manage professionally right now) to millions of users. I've also observed online communities longer than that, having participated (as many have) in online BBS' back when things like Citadel were popular. I don't approach the topic of online communities from a position of ignorance, but have a pretty large amount of experience in managing online communities. I've seen some succeed and some fail, and I think we all have similar goals - we want the community to be successful (who doesn't? Let's identify that now <G>). I think we should have some consensus about strategy to move forward so there is cohesion in the community and it's easy for the new user to come in and figure out where to ask their question. If we don't make it easy for the new user, while making it flexible enough for the experienced users, then the community won't grow because new users will get frustrated and go find something else to do. Can we agree to this? Jim

On Fri, 01 Jun 2007 09:44:31 -0700, MenTaLguY wrote: Agreed - I have nearly 200 newsgroups that I currently track, and when dealing with that many groups, a consistent interface is the only way I personally can get anything done at all. If I had to go from web site to web site to check all the stuff I follow, I'd never get any work done during the day (many of the groups pertain directly to my job). The POV-Ray community model is another great example of how this type of thing can (and should) work - they've got a web interface to an NNTP server; they've got binaries groups where inline image posting is permitted (though it's not a hard enforcement in other groups - I'm not sure why people think NNTP can't handle inline images, it certainly can). news.povray.org is usable both with a news reader as well as the web interface - those who might benefit from seeing how someone else has set this up might wander over and have a look. Jim

On 6/2/07, Jon A. Cruz <jon@...204...> wrote: at the end of the day, of all the art sites I've come across, not one of them uses a mailing list as an interface, I know every time we have this discussion y'all bring up the POVray site, but to my eyes its rather like how I found POVray itself, technically capable of doing the job but not exactly user friendly or pretty. you cant sticky a post full of tutorials on a mail list, you cant go back and edit so that the first post always has the latest version of your wip. Fundamentally tho theres a mindset involved. I dont know about other people but I wouldnt make the kind of short, looks good comments in response to an email that I might drop on a forum. Deviantart is a good step in the right direction in terms of art community, except its very much set up to show off finished peices, and unless you put a watch on everyone in the community then you have to proactively look for things to comment on. If you had a decent forum then that wouldnt be the case. I think something with a Gallery section and a WIP section that encouraged some display and gave a focal point for the teaching side of the community could be a good thing. Just my 2c Sim

On 6/2/07, Jim Henderson <hendersj@...155...> wrote: Thats all well and good, but if the 'right tool' isnt being looked at then it doesnt matter if its the right tool. You can have as many wikis as you want, but if jo blogs the user doesnt know to look there, all your going to end up with is a bunch of people asking in the mail list/ forum. And I wouldnt want absolutely anyone editing the post about my wip, dont mind them commenting, but thats a different thing. That depends on how your collaborating. If you want an everyone mucks in with no overall control approach, you want a wiki. if you simply want feedback on what is essentialy one persons creation, that their remaining in control of, I'd go with a forum still. I'm confused, thats half the point I was trying to make that you argued against that you've just come back and agreed with. Mailing lists arent suited to multimedia intensive discussions where not everyone wants to see everything. A forum doesnt stop it being inline, but at the same time doesnt overburden everyone with the need to download everything.

Jim Henderson wrote: Could be /one /approach to look at this, to pre-define (to the degree to which this is possible) what the various resources (mailing list, wiki, and (possibly) a blog are being used for? My suggestion: *- Wiki* for tutorials, links to other online resources (maybe to ImageMagick for processing exported bitmaps, to give but one example), *- Blog *for things like: Hey-I.just-did-this-cool-image-what-do-you- think type of stuff, *- the* *mailing list* for everything else (maybe with a short, friendly reminder: Please, take a look at the wiki first before posting to the list ;-). Greetings, Claus -- Home Page - http://home.arcor.de/ccyrny/ [in English] graf-o-matic 2.0 - http://grafomatic01.twoday.net/ [in German]

On 6/2/07, Jim Henderson <hendersj@...155...> 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. 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) 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. 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.) 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. I understand where your coming from, I just dont agree :) Cheers Sim

Aaron Spike-2 wrote: I kinda got keen for a challenge and created an independant, and obviously unofficial, forum specifically for Inkscape users - http://www.inkscapeforum.com/ There's been a lot passionate debate about forums and my venture isn't intended to ruffle peoples feathers. I'm just looking for a hobby, really - and I'm more than happy to use it to promote any other communities (official or not) that might appear. -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/forum--tf3787962.html#a10944015 Sent from the Inkscape - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

On Jun 2, 2007, at 9:09 AM, john cliff wrote: But you miss the main point. Although you don't happen to find the interface particularly pretty, it is far more than sufficient and has allowed an artistic community to flourish. The functionality of most forums is there, and people didn't need to make it prettier once they hit the sufficient level where artistic discussion and use hit critical mass. Consider a website with dancing flash animation all over. Pretty when you first see it, but once you try to navigate and all your browser controls are nonfunctional and your typing and cursor are heavily lagged from 100% CPU load, functional simplicity starts to show a bit more promising. (And, yes, I've hit that problem with forums I've checked out now and then)

On Sun, 03 Jun 2007 00:55:59 -0700, microUgly wrote: You're missing my point (at least): Don't create a *separate* forum, create one that works as a gateway to the existing stuff. vBulletin, for example, provides a "forum" experience to those who want that type of thing, and can gate things to an NNTP backend for those who want that. It doesn't have to be an either-or discussion. Jim

Forums for community: good idea. See Blender's forums. Just saying. I like the list, but miss a forum. /d

On Fri, 01 Jun 2007 22:15:59 -0700, Jon A. Cruz wrote: Well stated; this is what I was driving at, but this is a much more succinct way of putting it than I did. :-) Jim

Dear all, I'm a new (and very enthousiastic) user of Inkscape. Recently, I have moved all my fonts to the windows 'fonts' directory. However, It seemd that Inkscape did not recognize the new fonts. I could read from various topics that removing the font-cache file might resolve this porblem. I followed this procedure, but the problems remains. Is there anyone who could further advise me? I'm using Vista, could this cause any trouble? Many thanks in advance. Henk-Jan

Dave Niezabitowski wrote: Sorry but the only forum I know is French, it's on LinuxGraphic.org.

Dave Niezabitowski wrote the following on 5/31/2007 2:04 PM: ...and all will bow to my authority...evil laugh ensues. heathenx

I searched and searched for an Inkscape forum but couldnt find one on the net, I find mailing lists confusing as well, I think that someone who knows how to do it should create a forum for this awesome program. dniezby wrote: -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/forum--tf3787962.html#a11113840 Sent from the Inkscape - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

On Thursday 14 June 2007 00:52, chacmool wrote: OK I joined the list; I receive mail from the list; I direct it to a special folder for Inkscape; when I see that new mail has arrived I read it. And smetimes I reply to an email I see there. What confuses you about mailing lists? -- John Culleton Able Indexing and Typesetting Precision typesetting (tm) at reasonable cost. Satisfaction guaranteed. http://wexfordpress.com