On Wed, Jan 25, 2006 at 04:01:16PM +0100, houghi wrote:
Also it would be nice to know what the maintainers of the larger Linux forums are thinking about this, so ask them. :-)
I had hoped that one or two of them were lurking on this list and would speak up now. Before I "officially" address the other forums I would like to know what we, you, the opensuse community would want to offer them. Besides, anybody can go to to the forums and invite them to join this discussion, you don't need a @suse.de address for that ;-)
For me personally the ideal solution would be an integrated system of usenet, email and forum. Let me explain. There is software available that can convert usenet and email. There also is software that handles usenet as a forum (e.g groups.google) Subscribtion will be needed for posting, reading will be possible without subscribing, just as this would be done with the mailinglist and a forum.
I don't like this for one reason: the communication styles of mailing lists, usenet, and web forums are drastically different. This is not a technical problem, but a result of the historical development of communication on electronic networks. A merger of the three would result in a hybrid thing that nobody wants to use. Mailing lists with NNTP gateway are fine, and a forum with email notification (and maybe even a mail interface, though I haven't seen this working so far) is fine too. The difference between web forums, lists and newsgroups is not the frontend. We need the opensuse lists for coordinating the actual work, and I don't want them rendered unusuable by a forum gateway. Yes, that arrogant too, but I'm not talking about user support lists here ;-) Sonja -- Sonja Krause-Harder (skh@suse.de) Research & Development SUSE Linux Products GmbH