Subject: Re: [vserver] Request For Comments - VServer web presence http://test.songshu.org
From: Ed W <lists@wildgooses.com>
Date: Sat, 28 Feb 2009 16:22:52 +0000



>> For my site I just ripped off a bunch of the media help pages and
>> roughly strung them together.  I think it's either linked by default or
>> easily linked to put the help in the edit page?
>>   
> all the help pages are there, but indeed its to much explanation if
> you just want to start something simple, i think must pages on the
> existing wiki can be done with 3 or 4 uses of the wiki syntax so we
> need to simplify it a little and cut out a few thousand examples.

See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Cheatsheet

On Wikipedia this is the help link right under the edit box when editing
something

 
> its an idea, and i'm actually neutral to this , but i do must say that
> for me personally (someone joing in after the year 2000) that mailing
> lists did seem as some exotic thing from the past and you actually do
> need to be deeply involved already before they are any use to you.
> so it does sound like a "modern" good idea to me but only if you have
> some of the more experienced willing to donate some time to this,
> otherwise don't.

Just to highlight that other views exist - I am a web user from around
early 90s, back before the "web" was really here.  My preference is very
strongly for NNTP (new news, ie alt.pictures.russian-dolls-in-prison,
etc).  However, you hardly see anyone use these now.  It's basically
like in imap email server with full threading, etc.

I *personally* dislike web forums in general, but I concede that they
are much easier to search and interact with the history of past
discussions.  For example I don't contribute to the gentoo forums, but I
regularly find answers to my questions if I search in there.  In
contrast mailing lists work much better for people day to day involved
with a project - probably because it's *in your inbox* where you were
already working...

Anyway, I don't really have strong feelings - the trend is certainly to
add web forums.

However, I still think it's the wrong time to have this debate because I
can almost guarantee that 60% of the list (largely the key contributors
on average) will want mailing lists and the 40% more casual users will
want forums.  If we had more users then great, but right now it seems
like a small audience and disruptive to fragment it... (The normal
complaint is that it takes effort to go read 30 forums, but with email
all 30 come to me.)

Check out the gentoo forums/mailing lists for example (or the Mythtv
ones).  You will find that the forums are almost exclusively for end
users and the mailing lists are generally more -dev and much more
specialist or in depth users

> p.s.
> nntp??? i truly never heard of that and i'm 31, shame on me ;)

Really?  Where do you get all your porn from then if you don't get it
there?  Curious...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsgroup

Ed W