OK, the forum is coming..

Tue Jul 24 15:44:13 CEST 2007

Ben Burdette wrote:
> I'd have to say that for the casual or occasional user, there are 
> significant advantages to a web forum. For me, monitoring an active 
> email list like openmoko in my email client is a fairly sizable 
> undertaking - there are many emails per day to look through.  I take 
> time several times a day to look through these, or just mark the 
> folder 'read'.  If I were only want to look at the forum once every 
> few weeks, then subscribing to the list would be overkill.  On the 
> other hand, in order to participate in the list you need to 
> subscribe.  So web-search only users are in effect barred from posting.
> Even if our casual users wanted 70-80 emails a day for something they 
> only use once in a while, its still a hassle to set up if you don't 
> know about email filtering and etc.  Lots of people don't.
> Compare this to the effort needed to visit slashdot.  You register 
> once, and you never need to worry about it again.  Visit every day or 
> every 6 months, doesn't matter.
>
> The other aspect is that you are putting your real email address out 
> there on the internet for lots of people to look at.  This means its 
> an excellent place for spammers to harvest email accounts.  With a 
> forum your personal data is more anonymous.  Plus there is potential 
> for other social networking style things like user profiles - what 
> users are working on, etc. 
You are exactly correct.  Quite frankly I am completely, totally, 
overwhelmingly baffled at the resistance to the forums.  Quite a few 
people have expressed their dislikes of mailing lists and how they were 
*very* reluctant (like myself) to join.  Although I consider my self a 
developer and on somewhat on top of technical stuff, I still would 
prefer a web forum.  I think that *most* non-technical people would also 
be more comfortable with a forum.  I'm really not sure what the motive 
for NOT wanting a forum is, other than people being set in their ways 
and unwilling to accommodate people less technically proficient as they are.

Now, the title of this thread is "OK, the forum is coming.." because I 
thought that someone was going to set one up on at least until 
FIC/OpenMoko created an official one.  I think phpBB is the general 
consensus.  I would do it myself, but my servers are located at my house 
on a cable modem.  I have decent uptime, but it isn't as stable as a box 
in a noc.  I don't mind running it, but would prefer a more stable 
environment.  That said, just let me know if you want me to go ahead and 
set it up.  FYI, you can easily import/export to a different instance if 
we do want/need to change its location.

-Jonathon